Spring is coming ! Days are longer, temperatures are milder, our mood is better… Of course we all want to act like teenagers in love and forget about serious matters but it is not the time to loose our interest in essential books. In order to keep in touch with reality, here is a selection of books which make one think…

The long awaited memoir of Simone Veil, A Life (Haus Publishing) - one of the leading female politician of the 20th Century - has finaly been translated into English after a huge success in France last year.
As France's Minister for Health Simone Veil introduced the law to legalize abortion in 1975.  She was elected first female President of the European Parliament and was Minister of State for Social Affairs until 1995.  In 1998, aged 70, she received an honorary damehood (DBE) from the British government for her contributions to humanity. 'With exemplary forthrightness, Simone Veil charts her trajectory from her pre-war childhood in a secular Jewish family in Nice, through the misery of her year in Auschwitz and into the cut and thrust of French and European politics.  This document of a life is also a compact history of post-war France.' Lisa Appignanesi, President of the English branch of International PEN.

In Out of the shadows, a life of Gerda Taro, François Maspero (Souvenir Press) tells the story of the first woman known to photograph a battle from the front lines and to die covering war.
François Maspero vividly captures the extraordinary figures Taro knew and lived with (from Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn to Louis Aragon), and portays the assertion of liberty – political, sexual and personal – that was central to her life: once introduced to photography, Gerda Taro used photojournalism to serve her dream of winning freedom for all people.
François Maspero - who fought in the French Resistance as a teenager - is one of the France’s major literary figures. Variously a bookseller, editor and publisher, he is also a novelist and a translator into French of writers ranging from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Arturo Perez-Reverte.

Still in the spirit of war, the intriguing poems of  The Madness of Amadis and others poems, Jean Cassou (Agenda Edition) which follow his famous 33 Sonnets of the Resistance, are published in a bilingual edition for the first time. Jean Cassou, 1897-1986, a war-time Resistance leader, created France’s National Museum of Modern Art. For decades he was at the centre of cultural life in France and beyond, as art historian, novelist, essayist, intellectual and poet. The title poem is shaped by Cassou’s neardeath experience at the liberation of Toulouse in 1944.

This season is also a great occasion to discover three texts by Guy de Maupassant, translated for the first time into English ( Duchy of Lambeth).
The Foreign Soul and The Angelus are the first English translations of two Maupassant’s unfinished novels. In The Foreign Soul, we are in classic Maupassant territory. Robert Mariolle, a wealthy Parisian bachelor, has just arrived in the fashionable spa town of Aix-les-Bains determined to enjoy himself at the casino in the company of high society, attempting to get over his break up with mistress, Henriette Lambel. The Angelus was intended to be Maupassant’s great masterpiece, an ambitious inverted allegory of Christianity into which the author would pour his growing pessimism and despair. Set during the Franco-Prussian War, as were some of Maupassant’s finest short stories, The Angelus finds the pregnant Countess de Brémontal alone in her château as Prussian troops move into the neighbourhood.

In July 1881, Maupassant embarked on a dangerous journey to the troubled colony of Algeria, believed to be on the verge of an Arab insurrection. In To the Sun Maupassant describes a land and populace vanquished by the twin powers of the sun and French colonialism, he bows down before the former, finding a personal absolution in the light, heat and space of the desert. But he stands up to the latter, pointing out the faults and absurdities of French colonialism, all the while demonstrating his brilliance as a political reporter who came to understand Algeria and its problems in such a short space of time.

To put Maupassant’s view into perspective, Leaving Tangier (Arcadia), the last book by one of North Africa’s most successful post-colonial writers Tahar Ben Jelloun, describes the modern reality of the Maroccan youth.
Tangier, in the early 1990s: young Moroccans gather regularly in a seafront café to gaze at the lights on the Spanish coast glimmering in the distance. Facing a future with few prospects, their disillusionment is matched only by their desire to reach this paradise. Azel, the protagonist, is intent upon leaving one way or another. At the brink of despair he meets Miguel, a wealthy Spanish gallery-owner, who promises to take him to Barcelona if Azel will become his lover. Seeing no other solution, and although he has a girlfriend to whom he is promised, Azel agrees to Miguel’s proposition and thus begins a different kind of hell for the young Moroccan

And to continue with international French-speaking authors, Broken Glass, Alain Mabanckou (Serpent’s Tail) is a “mature, shocking, hilarious and innovative” novel, (le magazine littéraire). Disgraced school-teacher turned public writer, Broken Glass fails abysmally to stay out of trouble, as one drinker after another wants to make sure that their portrayal in the notebook, (not so golden this one), will reflect their dynamic, ebullient personnality. Broken glass is sickened by this false show of success and drowns his sorrow in red wine and riffs on the literature of Africa and the West. A mocking satire on the dangers of artistic integrity.

But isn’t spring the best moment to visit France and its capital? Let’s finish with a holiday with two books collecting texts about France and Paris.
French Tales (Oxford University Press) is a literary tour de France through twenty-two translated stories – one connected with each region – which gives a panoramic view of French society and culture, in all its variety and diversity. Here are stories by Zola, Annie Saumont, Marcel Aymé and many more; many of them translated into English for the first time by Helen Constantine.

City Lit Paris (Oxygen books) offers perfect gems of city writing as the first  in a unique new travel series.  “We really think that the amazing writing about Paris, fiction, non fiction, popular and literary, past and present, makes it the best way to enjoy the city” Heather Reyes (editor). While there are many excellent guide books, none offer the unique feel for the sights, sounds and flavours of the city that only best writers can provide. With authors ranging from Proust, Maupassant, Nemirovsky, Queneau to Agnès Catherine Poirier, Faïza Guène, Julian Barnes,  and over sixty writers…

We wish you a very pleasant spring and we hope this selection will help to entertain those who will have to stay at home to avoid sneezing and other forms of allergies…

Paul Fournel and Laure de Vaugrigneuse