The temperature may be scorching, the evenings still long and the beaches crowded, but it’s time for the start of the school year for writers and their publishers. Significantly, fewer of them are publishing this year: the overall production “drops by 5% and stands at 473 French and foreign novels to be published between August and October”, reveals a study carried out by Livres Hebdo/Électre Data Services.
The cause of this “historically meager” production, which will see the publication of “only” 328 French novels, and 145 translations from abroad? Inflation and soaring paper prices, the crisis of which took hold over time. This decline in publications does not in any way affect the effervescence of the literary community, which carefully scrutinizes production, watching for good vintages, nice surprises and fiascos.
Here is a selection of the titles of the 2023 literary season that the members of the Point editorial staff have already spotted.
This month of August sees the return to bookstores of several of the names best known to French readers, such as Amélie Nothomb (whose presence in bookstores has been a must for every literary season since the release of Hygiène de l’assassin in 1992), the Prix ??Goncourt Pascal Quignard and Mathias Enard, but also Éric Reinhardt, Agnès Desarthe, Serge Joncour, Sorj Chalandon, Laurent Binet, or even Patrick Deville, Santiago Amigorena, Lyonel Trouillot, Lionel Duroy…
Other promising feathers are returning with daring literary bets, such as Jérémy Fel, whose thriller Despite all my rage ignites social networks, Laurent Petitmangin, author of Ce qu’il faut de nuit, a great success in 2020, who is setting his new novel, Animal Lands, in a post-irradiation dystopian zone, Arthur Dreyfus, who imagines the fate of a man armed with a supernumerary member in the midst of the Great War in the novel Third Hand, or Dimitri Rouchon-Borie, very noticed in 2021 for Le Démon de la colline aux loups (the Tripod) which this time chisels the destiny of two gypsy characters.
Other prominent authors are turning to the exploration of secrecy and intimacy, such as Neige Sinno, who tells in Triste Tigre (POL) the abused childhood, Sarah Chiche, who intertwines the story of the missing skull from Goya to that of a family secret in Les Alchimie (Seuil), Guy Boley, who lends his incantatory pen to the little-known story of Nietzsche’s sister (To my sister and only, Grasset), or Chloé Delaume, who explores in Pauvre Folle, published by Seuil, the personal tragedies of its heroine, stubbornly in love with a gay man.
This literary return will be the test of fire for some 74 first novels. Among them, we note the names of Eden Levin (at Notabilia), Clément Camar-Mercier (Actes Sud), Yan Lespoux (Agullo), Simon Bentolila and Amaury Barthet (both at Albin Michel), Juliette Oury (Flammarion), Mokhtar Amoudi (Gallimard), Alice Renard (Héloïse d’Ormesson), Dea Liane (L’Olivier), Julie Héraclès (Lattès), Éric Chacour (Philippe Rey)…
And on the foreign side? Here too, several heavyweights of world literature return, starting with Salman Rushdie, a year after the attack that nearly cost him his life (La Cité de la Victoire, Actes Sud), accompanied by Joyce Maynard (L’Hôtel des birds, Philippe Rey), Zeruya Shalev (Stupor, Gallimard), Louise Erdrich (The Sentence, Albin Michel), David Vann (The Obscure Country, Gallmeister), NoViolet Bulawayo (Glory, Otherwise), Maggie O’Farrell (The Portrait of marriage, Belfond), the Icelandic Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (Eden, Zulma) Lídia Jorge (Misericordia, Métaillié), Emily St. John Mandel (The Sea of ??Tranquility, Shores) and of course the Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka (Chroniques du pays of the happiest people in the world, Seuil).
Still on the foreign shelf, there is also a lot of talk about the American novelist Hernán Diaz, who received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his second novel, Trust (L’Olivier), by David Grann, whose titles are snapped up by Hollywood (at to appear: Les Naufragés du Wager at Editions du Sous-Sol), Atticus Lish (The World of the Flowery Bank, Bourgois), Lapvona, the new novel by Ottessa Moshfegh (Fayard), Thieves of Innocence by Sarai Walker (Gallmeister), the South Korean Han Kang and his Impossible Farewells (Grasset) or Tasmania by Paolo Giordano at Bruit du Monde. The new Nina Allan, Conquest, at Tristram, devoted to the very current theme of conspiracy, has all the assets to create a new buzz, after the brilliant success of La Fracture (2019). And the list of wonders to discover, of course, is far from exhaustive…
