Recent French Fiction: 2022

"Winner of the Prix Goncourt, this dizzying literary page-turner ingeniously blends crime, fantasy, sci-fi, and thriller as it plumbs the mysteries surrounding a Paris-New York flight. In June 2021, a senseless event upends the lives of hundreds of men and women, all passengers on a flight from Paris to New York. Among them: Blake, a respectable family man, though he works as a contract killer; Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star tired of living a lie; Joanna,...

"Anna has been living happily for twenty years with loving, sturdy, outgoing Guillaume when she suddenly (truly at first sight) falls in love with Thomas. Intelligent and handsome, but apparently scarred by a terrible early emotional wound, he reminds Anna of Jude the Obscure. Adrift and lovelorn, she tries unsuccessfully to fend off her attraction, torn between the two men. 'How strange it is to leave someone you love for someone you love. You cross...

An award-winning Haitian novel about silence, beauty, and the solidarity of tears. Airports are distillations of the world. I like thinking of them that way. The hope of leaving and the desire to come home, existing side by side. Any voyage is possible. My mind flies off toward the blue province once again. I don’t know, anymore, why I always associate it with blue. It isn’t even my favorite color. Traveling alone from Miami to Port-au-Prince,...

"First published after the author's death in 2008, this provocative novel charts the late-in-life sexual awakening of a retired army officer who embarks on a dangerous affair with a male servant. Captain Ni'mat, a reservist from the Egyptian army defeated by the Israelis in 1967, finds himself aging and idle, spending his days at a luxurious private club in Cairo with former comrades. One night, Captain Ni'mat has an exquisite, chilling dream: he...

"Corentin's childhood felt like an aimless pilgrimage. Unwanted, he was moved from one temporary home to another, until the day he ended up in the care of an old woman, Augustine. Deep within the Valley, the remote region where Augustine lives, Corentin's life is renewed. Years later, Corentin fully immerses himself in the dazzling pleasures and distractions of urban life while around him the world is on fire. Temperatures continue to rise, causing...

"From the acclaimed author of Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, a deeply personal and insightful account of being a girl, woman, and mother in a world that sees the feminine as less than. Born in 1959 to a middle-class family, Laurence Barraqué grows up with her sister in the northern city of Rouen. Her father is a doctor, her mother a housewife. She understands from an early age, by way of language and her parents' example, that a girl's place in life...

From the introduction by Herv? Delouche: The term Greater Paris is in vogue today, for it has an administrative cachet and seems to denote a simple extension of the capital?as if a ravenous Paris need only extend her web. However, it was not our goal to embrace the tenets of the metro area?s comprehensive plan, aka the Grand Projet, envisioned as a future El Dorado by the planners and developers. Rather, our aim was to depict the Parisian suburbs...

"From the Prix Goncourt-winning author of And Their Children After Them, a devilishly smart noir novella that finds uncomfortable truths in the everyday about romance, violence, and women's desire and desirability. Nearing fifty, with a divorce and a string of other failed relationships behind her, Rose has given up on the idea of love, if not sex-though that always comes with risks. Determined not to let another man hurt her, she even ordered a .38...

"In this follow-up to When the Plums Are Ripe, Patrice Nganang writes of a sick father telling his son about the life he lived in Cameroon, the story of his family, the civil war, and his country"--