Rule number one for a successful suitcase: don’t forget to slip a novel (or several!) between the bathing suit, flip-flops and sunscreen. But what to choose from among the stacks of novels that catch your eye in bookstores?
To guide you to the readings that will meet our expectations, we have selected twenty of our favorites of the year, ensuring that there is something for everyone, whether you want to shiver, to dream , nourish your spirit or soothe your soul.
Tarik, a docker in the port of Bizerte, knows how to swim like no other. But as it crosses the Tunisian lake, it bumps into an iron giant: what is this huge ship doing on the calm waters? In this year 1921, refugees flock by the thousands from Eastern Europe. The Red Army, which is sweeping everywhere, is preparing to invade Crimea. The White Russian survivors of the Bolshevik revolution are confined to Tunisian waters, under French protectorate. On one of the liners, a young Ukrainian, Yelena, dreams of being the heroine of Chekhov to forget that she has just lost everything. Tarik and Yelena, who are separated by everything, would like to love each other, but in the chaos of exile, faced with History moving towards tragedy, will they be able to? We find in this sensory novel, tender and exciting, all the sweetness and intelligence of Didier Decoin, who opposes the ferocity of wars with kindness, passion, dreams and sharing. This beautiful romance resonates like a plea to welcome others in times of war: timeless, alas, and heartbreaking.
The Swimmer of Bizerte, by Didier Decoin (Stock, 350 p., €22.50)
“I think one of the duties of literature is to continue to reflect on the way of life that we can find to live well in these times of disaster,” said Yoko Tawada on receiving her Fragonard Prize for En scout. the last of the novels of this magnificent Japanese writer. In the distant post-Fukushima future, she imagines the relationship between a Japanese writer (more than a century old) and his great-grandson: their world is no longer quite ours, telephones have disappeared among other oddities … How to leave a Japan that has become isolationist where foreign words are forbidden? Such a delicate language, a mobile, preposterous and sharp imagination, you can put in your suitcases and this novel, and the one that appears at the same time L’Ange transtibétain, playful jewel of scholarship around Paul Celan. And while we’re at it, all his work for a Tawada summer, come on!
En scout, by Yoko Tawada, translated from Japanese by Dominique Palmé (Verdier, 160 p., €20)
“When we swim, we turn our backs on the weight of the earth,” says Chantal Thomas in The Embrace of Water in her interviews with Fabrice Lardreau, in the “Versant Intime” collection, which he directs. The theme ? Her relationship with water and the beach, which she has cultivated since her childhood spent in Arcachon. If this is not surprising for the author of Journal de nage, the originality lies in the link she weaves between nature and literature. Through his aquatic confidences the secrets of his literary art are revealed. A nomad, Chantal Thomas chooses the right place and time to write, “a bit like putting your towel on the sand”. This hedonist who has placed her existence under the sign of independence approaches the question of female emancipation, through the prism of swimming: “A swimmer escapes all external definition, all control. Newly elected to the French Academy in the chair of Jean d’Ormesson, she talks about her affinities with this great swimmer whom she quotes: “Happiness is a staircase that descends into the sea.”
The Embrace of Water, by Chantal Thomas, interviews with Fabrice Lardreau (Arthaud, 192 p., €13)
Rachel Arditi, actress (theater is a family affair: she is the sister of Pierre Arditi), dedicates her first book to her father, the painter Georges Arditi, and to the Alzheimer’s disease that killed him in 2012. The heroine of this novel, an actress whose career is not really taking off, fervently hopes to play the role of Tatiana in a theatrical adaptation of Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin. When she’s not working on this adaptation project, she goes to the retirement home for artists where her father is a resident. This novel explores two pains: that of having to navigate a professional environment that does not give any gifts and that of seeing a loved one sink into an incurable disease. There was enough to write a depressing work. But joy and appeasement illuminate the text. Thanks to this novel of theater and poetry, of love, mourning and recognition, it is the birth of a writer that we celebrate.
I have it all in my head, by Rachel Arditi (Flammarion, 256 p., €19)
The myth of Icarus never ceases to make us dream. For what ? In a book published thirty years ago, Jacques Lacarrière, the lover of Greece whose Dictionary (Plon) is to be put in all pockets, signed L’Envol d’Icare that Seghers is republishing with a preface by the astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet. With his greedy erudition, the author of L’Été grec talks deliciously with Icarus, questions all the versions of the myth since Ovid’s Metamorphoses, does not forget the ingenious Daedalus who stuck his wings on the back of his son and he succeeded in his trip to Sicily. Why the fall? To follow his dream… And how can this call not continue to fascinate us, poor Earthlings that we remain. What a joy to read Jacques Lacarrière with his joyful and sharing knowledge!
The Flight of Icarus, by Jacques Lacarrière, preface by Jean-Pierre Luminet, (Seghers, 160 p., €19)
Love Dictionary of Greece, (Plon, 679 p., €14)
In 1990, Irene was hired at the “Office for the Clarification of Fates”, located in the German town of Bad Arolsen, which since 1943 has been archiving documents and objects that belonged to the victims of Nazism. Who owns this handkerchief, a patchwork of patiently assembled pieces of fabric? And this little cotton Pierrot, torn from a child, on which is inscribed a serial number? Following in the footsteps of their owners, Irène follows the trail of broken destinies, from Paris to Berlin, from Thessaloniki to Argentina. In this poignant fiction, Gaëlle Nohant reveals the history of the Arolsen Archives and the secrets of the Third Reich.
The Office for the Clarification of Destinies, by Gaëlle Nohant (Grasset, 416 p., €23)
The Kingfisher Lodge in Colorado is the place to be for the “rich and famous”. This is where a sad cowboy named Jack has just landed a job as a fishing guide. He hopes to find in this dream job at the Kingfisher Lodge a cure for the traumatic memory that haunts him (readers of the fabulous The River, published in 2021, know what it is). Things look very good at first, then shadows appear on the board. Why is the estate surrounded by a high security fence, cameras, guard dogs? Who is this trigger-happy neighbor? Soon, Jack and Alison find themselves prisoners of a paradise transformed into hell where the most sordid traffic is organized. If Heller’s color chart willingly stretches towards black, the criminal plot is for him only a process of decoction aimed at extracting the most tragic, the most vibrant and the most poetic moods from human existence.
The Guide, by Peter Heller, translated from English (United States) by Céline Leroy (Actes Sud, 304 p., €22.80)
Thirty-seven walks in the mythical Roman city in the company of Pompeians who really existed and who have been resuscitated by archaeology. This is the challenge masterfully taken up by Pascal Charvet and his dream team of renowned specialists in Antiquity. We expected it to be serious and complete, but not so pleasant to read. We dine there in front of the frescoes of the villa of Lucius Caecilius Jucundus, a banker who covered his house with very intimate amorous scenes, we meet the gladiator Céladus the Thracian at the theater who “makes the girls sigh”, we have a drink in a popina (tavern) and if you want to dare more spicy escapades, you go to a cella meretricia (a room of “meretrix”, in Latin “winner”) of Region VII of the city, the authors being not not the type to evade the assertive taste of the Pompeians for the pleasures of the skin. Pompeii now has its Bible.
Pompeii, under the direction of Pascal Charvet, Annie Collignat and Stéphane Gompertz (Books, 1,152 p., €32)
Thirteen years we’ve been waiting for it! Bret Easton Ellis, the cult author of American Psycho, is back with an exceptional novel, both breathless thriller, erotic story (just as breathless), subtle and cutting novel of initiation, splendid hymn to adolescence, false autobiography, full of chases on Mulholland Drive between Mercedes 450 SL and Porsche 911, with palm trees, lies and a pool party, but also night scenes with very high dramatic tension impossible to let go. The story: In the early 1980s, a group of super-posh high school students from Sherman Oaks see a new student arrive at school. He is handsome as a god, his name is Robert Mallory, and everyone melts, magnetized by his charm. Maleficent, according to the narrator, alias Bret Easton Ellis himself at 17 (we are asked to believe him), who takes a very dim view of the stranger imposing himself in the gang. Especially when a wave of murders sweeps through Los Angeles… Impossible to let go.
Les Éclats, by Bret Easton Ellis, translated by Pierre Guglielmina, (Robert Laffont, 600 p., €26)
In 2016, writer Jerry Stahl was depressed. Looking at an advertisement, he discovers that there are tour operators in Eastern Europe transporting tourists by bus from concentration camp to concentration camp. This Ashkenazi Jew, part of whose ancestors were victims of the Holocaust, decides to confront the absolute horror, in order to put his problems in perspective… Here he is in Poland, with a bus full of vacationers. With his desperate humour, Jerry Stahl smacks of the more than limited treatment given to places of remembrance of the genocide in Eastern Europe, where the horror of the camps is superimposed on odious marketing and sometimes obscene tourists. Stahl skins humanity to its sick core, transcribes its most abominable hours, but also delivers a story full of self-mockery, which heals the wounds of the world while revealing them.????
Nein, Nein, Nein! : depression, torments of the soul and the Holocaust by coach, by Jerry Stahl translated from English (United States) by Morgane Saysana (Rivages, 352 p., €22)
Yvonne, the tobacconist from the village of Castelnau, sensuality itself, makes the narrator dream, 21 years old, a teacher appointed for his first job, in 1961, in this backwater called Périgord located on the Grande Beune. To La Grande Beune published in 1996, Pierre Michon added La Petite Beune, and the two novels together do wonders, confirming, despite its rarity in bookstores, that Michon remains among the most desirable of French-speaking prose writers. When he is not thinking of Yvonne, whose only “appearances” matter to him, Pierre (name of the character) observes the inhabitants of this village of which he knows everything. And suddenly “the course of things rushed” and the distraught goes to meet his burning desire…
The Two Beunes, by Pierre Michon (Verdier, 151 p., €18.50)
Friendship is not often at the heart of novels, which prefer to deal with love. But to read this little jewel of bittersweet literature, we say to ourselves that it is a mistake. When his best friend dies suddenly while on vacation in Asia, Cyr, a thirty-year-old living in Amsterdam, whose somewhat lunar temperament places him slightly out of step with life, sees his world collapse. The pain is so intense that she takes refuge in the compulsive assembly of Ikea furniture, leaving her job and her life behind. She is required to return to France to deliver a speech at the funeral. Her return home is an inner journey, which gently brings her back to the shore of the living. We read this book between laughter and tears, blown away by the biting style of the author, upset by the intelligence of her words on friendship as on mourning. Essestial.
The Worst Friend in the World, by Alexandra Matine (Les Avrils, 336 p., €22)
In Denmark, the Christiansen are undertakers from father to son. The life of Nicolas, the last of seven generations, is a shipwreck. He is the widower of the love of his life. At the head of the family undertaker’s business, he is driven by necrophiliac impulses – unfortunate, when one wants to practice his profession in the rules of the art. He can’t stand his children anymore, an angry girl, a demonic boy. Will he drown them, give them away, abandon them? Along a car journey that leads his offspring to a surprising destiny, Nicolas unfolds the history of the generations that preceded him. Each Christiansen has developed a form of funerary genius (in marketing, embalming, mediumship, etc.) and other more or less unhealthy particularities that we take great pleasure in discovering over the chapters. This macabre comedy is a great family and historical fresco, whose philosophical dimension catches us between two smiles. This summer, put away the towels, take out the shroud: you won’t regret it!
In an Italy about to go to war, people venerate God, the Virgin and the Duce. Maddalena is still only a little girl, but the people of her town, in the plain of the Po, fear her as much as they despise her. For them, she is the “Malnata”, the “ill-born”, daughter of the demon. Coming from the working class, she fascinates Francesca, a solitary child of good society, suffocating between parents demolished by the death of their youngest son, carried away by polio. In this great night without lighthouse that is the end of their childhood, the friendship which is woven between the two girls is a fire of joy. But tragedy awaits them, ruthlessly. This first novel, written in a fresh language, with crystalline vigor, grips your soul and won’t let go.
La Malnata, by Beatrice Salvioni, translated from the Italian by Françoise Bouillot (Albin Michel, 336 pp., €21.90)
Sixteen-year-old Allie’s life is turned upside down when the apartment she shares with her parents is broken into. Nothing very valuable has gone missing, except maybe a picture of her, posted in her bedroom. Not so bad? Except that the trauma of the intrusion obsesses her, especially since the young girl feels, since then, spied on in her own house. The culprits, we learn very quickly, are Matthieu, known as “Shark”, a high school friend of Allie, who harbors troubled feelings for her, and her brother, who has just been released from prison. Over the course of this very tight novel, in which the emotions specific to adolescence coexist – social malaise, love affair, desire for solitude and thirst for intimacy – Delphine Bertholon, who publishes in the vein of youth as for adults, deploys with tact and style the palette of youth torments. His sensitive pen, his universe both timeless and very contemporary seduced the jury, as well as the outcome of the novel, whose subtlety illuminates the gray picture of the characters with a chiaroscuro that lulls the soul.
What awaits me in the dark, by Delphine Bertholon (Albin Michel, 192 p., €14.90)
The kingdom of Tralala is in crisis! Where do these earthquakes come from that turn all his characters upside down, from the king, queen and princess to the dragon counting his gold coins, passing by the valiant knight, the Little Red Riding Hood, the voracious wolf, the Three Little Pigs, and other archetypal figures from children’s stories…? In this hilarious book that you read to your little ones (from 4 years old), the characters join forces to stop the spell that the reader throws at them every time they turn the page, turning them upside down all this fabulous kingdom. The challenge is daunting: we can only devour this very amusing album, with hilarious text and joyful drawing, winner of the Le Point youth book prize, album category. This new kid’s obsession will make their parents happy!
Patatras in the kingdom of Tralala, by Matthieu Gargallo and Lucie Bryon (Sens Dessus Dessous editions, 40 p., €13.90)
If you like to shiver even under the zenith sun, go under good escort with these four policemen.
How can we forget Raoul, (Bernard Blier) in Lautner’s film Les Tontons flingueurs, setting up a homemade bomb to blow up Fernand, (Lino Ventura) who listens to him in the shadows: “So? Is he sleeping asshole? Hey, he’ll sleep even better there when he’s taken that in the face! He will hear the angels sing, the Gugusse de Montauban! I’ll send it straight back to the motherhouse, to the terminus of the pretentious! “. The cult line would become the title of a 1968 novel, Le Terminus des pretentieux, itself a “rehash” of Pray for them! (not found!), according to Michel Audiard’s grandson, Marcel, in the preface to this volume which had never been reissued. A juicy opus, which fits in your pocket – which the narrator will have “recklessly stretched” when approaching Marie-Marguerite, “perverse or blind”… Pure Audiard.
Le Terminus des pretentieux, by Michel Audiard (Le Cherche-midi-Borderline, 240 p., €13.50).
From the height of his 86 springs, the venerable James Lee Burke, author of In the Electric Mist, Dave Robicheaux’s first investigation, never ceases to surprise us. Especially when he returns to Houston, Texas, his hometown, in the 1950s, his youth. The plot that will play out is based on a ruthless fight between two clans. The well-born, the band of Grady Harrelson, beautiful (and big) mouth, to whom everything succeeded. And the less well-born, on the Aaron side, the narrator, ultra-nervous, rebellious, without self-esteem, but madly in love since he met Valérie Epstein’s gaze at the drive-in – Grady’s girlfriend. Which is for him to directly pull the trigger of certain death. The portrait of a golden youth, despite everything, sip of testosterone, consumed with jealousy and revenge… And the good news is that it is a series. Aaron happens to be the grandson of Hackberry Holland, met in the previous volume, The House of the Rising Sun, the first translation of the Holland Family Saga.
The Jealous, by James Lee Burke. Translated from English (United States) by Christophe Mercier (Rivages, 432 p., €24).
This is undoubtedly Franck Thilliez’s most audacious novel. Firstly because it was necessary to dare to install the theme of death in the exclusive center of the book. Then because, after 23 books, the novelist is now in full control of his art, this time with a couple of dented cops whom we love to find, secondary characters to whom unbearable dramas happen, a necrophiliac killer with a despicable ritual , science and high technology to make you dream. Finally, Thilliez embeds a strong societal issue in his police investigation. The question of euthanasia is experienced there as a personal experience by its characters. The pros, the cons, what the law says, the heart… We revolve around this death, certain, true, which gives a rare weight and density to fiction.
La Faille, by Franck Thilliez (Fleuve editions, 504 p., €22.90).
One day in the 1980s, the receptionist at the Victory-Palace hotel in Pointe-Noire, a coastal town in Congo-Brazzaville, found three books abandoned by a hotel guest. At the end of his shift, the receptionist took his loot, Alice in Merguez Land, Uncle Tom’s Heist and Al Capote, home. This is how the son of this receptionist, Alain Mabanckou, discovered Frédéric Dard, known as “San-Antonio”, who would “train” him and “accompany his first steps as a writer”. To Alain Mabanckou, through this story, entrusted as a preface, the honor of inaugurating the first volume of this reissue of the San-Antonios chosen by those who love him. The second, Say hello to the lady and Should we kill little boys with their hands on their hips? will come next November from the choice of another follower of the commissioner, Anny Duperey.
Three essential novels by Frédéric Dard, known as “San-Antonio”, presented by Alain Mabanckou (Fleuve noir, 576 p., €19.90).
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