"Le Divorce meets The Elegance of the Hedgehog in this hilariously entertaining mega-bestseller from France - When her chronically unemployed husband runs off to start a crocodile farm in Kenya with his mistress, Joséphine Cortès is left in an unhappy state of affairs. The mother of two--confident, beautiful teenage Hortense and shy, babyish Zoé--is forced to maintain a stable family life while making ends meet on her meager salary as a medieval...

A lone hunter, lost in Germany's Taunus Mountains, seeks refuge in Castle Eppstein where his sleep is disturbed by the half-dead Countess von Eppstein, the victim of an ancient prophecy.

"From the author of the "wonderfully ingenious" (Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review) novel After the Crash, a thrilling tale of a murder that takes place in Claude Monet's garden and the mystery that surrounds it. Giverny, France. During the day, the town is the home of the famous artist Claude Monet and the gardens where he painted his Water Lilies. But once the tourists have gone, there is a darker side to the peaceful French village....

There are situations in which we fail for a moment to recognize the person we are with, in which the identity of the other is erased while we simultaneously doubt our own. That also happens with couples - indeed, above all with couples, because lovers fear more than anything else "losing sight" of the loved one. With artfulness in expanding and playing variations on the meaningful moment, Milan Kundera has made this situation - and the vague sense...

"I was bored with my husband," says Anne-Marie, the irrepressible voice of Anne-Marie la Beauté, "but you know, boredom is part of love." Mostly she is speaking here of her more famous friend and colleague, the French actress Giselle Fayolle, in whose shadow she has spent her career. "My life was a near miss," she adds, before explaining that she enunciated well because "I loved to say the words." A very short novel with the power and resonance of...

"At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars's Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch except that it's a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by his starstruck psychiatrist (the narrator of the book), who foresees a companionship...

"George Sand's delightful last novel takes the timeless theme of a younger woman in love with an older man and gives the stuff of nineteenth century romance a modern feminist twist at the same time that it subtly attacks that other Marianne, the French Republic's convention-bound Muse."--Page 4 of cover.