As you well know, September is the liveliest month in the French literary calendar. Everybody waits, as though at the races, for their horse to be let out of the starting box. Publishers are ready with the latest releases of their best authors, journalists stand at the sidelines, notebooks in hand, booksellers clear shelf space for the 600 novels about to be released… and readers don’t know where to start!
So now, at the beginning of October, and after a month of intensive reading, we are happy to share with you our first crushes of this rentrée. Of course there will be much more in the next few weeks but before Frankfurt, here is a swift summary of some exciting bets to place on your reading list this autumn.

Des Hommes, by Laurent Mauvignier (Les Editions de Minuit)
Bernard, Rabut and Février were called to Algeria at the time of the ‘events’, in 1960. Two years later, they return to France. They keep their mouths shut. They get on with their lives. But sometimes it takes almost nothing, a winter birthday and a present in a pocket, for the past to surge back up into the lives of people who thought that they could bury it. 

Laurent Mauvignier was born in 1967.

La Perrita, by Isabelle Condou (Plon)
In Buenos Aires, 1996, Violetta has built her life on illusion and lies. Distraught that she is unable to bear a child, she uses her husband’s position - an officer involved in the brutal crimes of the government – to take the child of one of the desaparecidos, victims of the military dictatorship. The girl grows up unaware of her true origins, but discovers her story shortly before her eighteenth birthday, when she disappears to find her blood relatives. Reunited with her roots, will she be willing to confront the whole truth? In the course of the day of her birthday preparations, the intimate tragedies of both families are played out. Behind these scars lies the story of an entire country. This is a novel that explores with delicacy and intelligence the interwoven struggles of two opposed women, offering a torn Argentina the hope of reconciliation. 

Isabella Condou is the author of two previous novels, Il était disparu, (Plon, 2004), and La Solitude de l’aube (Plon, 2007).

Le Cœur en dehors, by Samuel Benchetrit (Grasset)
Charly Traoré is an adorable ten-year-old, originally from Mali, who lives in one of Paris’s outer-city housing estates - the two towering blocks of the Tour Rimbaud and the Tour Simone de Beauvoir. Charly’s world revolves around his gang, his girlfriend, his older brother, a drug addict, and especially his mother - who has been ‘nicked’ by the police for not having the correct papers. For a whole day, hour after hour, Charly wanders through his estate, in search of his brother and mother. He meets some great characters, rubs up against a few gang members, plays a game of football, plays truant, daydreams idly. As we follow his crazy associations of ideas, his grown-up-child digressions, we meet an innocent vision of a world that is harsh. Charly’s point of view onto his sordid ‘banlieue’ is filled with witticisms and wonderment. At the start of the book, Charly believes that Rimbaud is just the name of a tower block. But by the end of the novel, he has discovered that Rimbaud was a famous poet - whose insights are relevant to his childhood plight, his dawn-to-dusk Odyssey.

Samuel Benchetrit, who was born in 1973, is a writer, actor and director. His works include J’ai toujours rêvé d’être un gangster [I always dreamed of becoming a gangster], 2008, and Janis et John, (2003).

Ce que je sais de Vera Candida, by Véronique Ovaldé (Editions de l’Olivier)
Somewhere in Latin America, three woman of the same lineage seem destined towards the same fate: to give birth to a young girl whose father they must never name. These women – Rose, Violette, and Vera Candida – have a love for liberty, yet are tinged with melancholy,  are strong and reckless, and yet come up against the fate ascribed to their gender. Each has her own way of fighting for her personal identity, to choose a path she has paved for herself, as an emancipated mother. In this dazzling tale, Ovaldé mixes realism with magic, fantasy with fiction, as her enchanted writing style summons a story of universal appeal.   

Véronique Ovaldé was born in 1972. Ce que je sais de Vera Candida is her seventh novel. In 2008, her novel, Et mon coeur transparent won the Prix France Culture/Télérama.

Le Chœur des femmes, by Martin Winckler (POL)
Jean Atwood, a hospital intern, top of his class for four years running, has set his sights on becoming a chief ob-gyn surgery resident. Instead he is to spend his last semester interning in a women’s health clinic. Atwood wants to perform surgery, not waste his time listening to women talk about themselves all day long. Nor does he relish taking orders from department head, Franz Karma, who has a rather controversial reputation.
But reality never lives up to expectation, and the relationship between the two doctors turns out to be very different from what Atwood has imagined. A bildungsroman, Le Choeur des femmes (The Women’s Chorus) is also a choral novel, its structure inspired by musical theatre. Over the course of his sojourn in the microcosm that is Unit 77, Dr Atwood has to deal with women who tell him about their lives, their loves and their deaths, both as “soloists” and as members of a deafening chorus. It is also a story of enigmas: just like the patients in their care, both Atwood and Karma harbour a secret: one that drives, divides and ultimately unites them.

Marc Zaffran was born in Algiers in 1955 and has lived in France since 1963. He began publishing fiction in 1984 under the pseudonym Martin Winckler, a name he chose as a tribute to Georges Perec. His novel, La Maladie de Sachs [The Case of Doctor Sachs] won the 1998 Prix du Livre Inter, and was made into a film of the same name. 

Les Aimants, by Jean-Marc Parisis (Stock)
This is the story of a man who hopes that he can find, in his writing, the young woman he has lost in life. Ava, whom he met when he was twenty. Ava, his love, his friend, his soul mate. Ava, whose light went out, though she was ablaze with life. And life truly does blaze in this novel: sparks of wonderment, innocence, and violence, too. With every page turned, these enfants terribles discover more about each other. When they split, at thirty, it is only to become closer. Another of love’s miracles, and another of its mysteries. Despite never remaining apart, the couple never actually live together. Such close partners, and so free, that they thought they could play with time - not realising that time could hurt them, or suspecting that death could separate them. This novel with its proud, contemplative beauty kills time and looks death in the eye, to carve out a magnificent portrait of a woman somewhere between heaven and earth, of a love as secret and solitary as poetry.

Jean-Marc Parisis was born in 1962. Lodestones is his sixth novel after, most notably, Depuis toute la vie (Grasset, 2000), Physique (Stock, 2005) and Avant, pendant, après (Stock, 2007.

Le Club des incorrigibles optimistes, by Jean-Michel Guenassia (Albin Michel)
Paris, 1959. Twelve-year-old Michel belongs to two families - the Marinis and the Delaunays – and they hate each other. Michel is a student at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris and likes to play table football in his local cafés. The Balto at Denfert is one of his favourite haunts. It’s here that he discovers the Incurable Optimists’ Club, whose members include Sartre and Kessel. The Club is actually a chess club composed of self-exiled Hungarians, Soviets, Poles and Germans: all communists, penitents, traitors, or renegades, and all racked by remorse. Each has an outlandish or tragic past, and each saved his skin by escaping from behind the Iron Curtain. Michel’s family, meanwhile is falling apart. His brother goes to fight in Algeria, only later to become a deserter. Meanwhile, as Michel is going through the awkward stage of adolescence, he comes to know the history of these tortured men and recounts their many-faceted lives, marked by both greatness and cowardice. In this monumental panorama, History with a capital H unfolds alongside a family saga, and lives sacrificed in the name of ideals become the subjects of a magnificent narrative.

Jean-Michel Guenassia was born in 1950. He has worked as a lawyer, screenwriter and
playwright. In 2002, he dropped everything to focus on writing Le Club des incorrigibles optimistes.

Trois femmes puissantes, by Marie NDiaye (Gallimard)
Trois femmes puissantes [Three Strong Women] is the book beneath the French media’s spotlight this rentrée. Three, tenuously linked narratives. At their heart, three women who say no. Forty year-old Norah arrives at the home of her father in Africa. An egocentric tyrant, he has now become silent and bulimic, and spends his nights perched in a tree in the courtyard. Why did he ask her to come? The answer, Norah discovers, is worse than she could have ever imagined. Fanta, who used to teach French in Dakar, had to follow her partner, Rudy, to France. Here, Rudy proves incapable of providing her with the rich and joyful life she deserves. He remains under the morbid influence of his mother, who dedicates her life to convincing her entourage of the existence of angels. Destabilised, Rudy wanders through an angry reality, while Fanta, by his side, is a rock. Khady Demba is a young African widow. Penniless, she tries to find her distant cousin, Fanta, in France. The long journey of emigration she pursues will be punctuated with unspeakable suffering.
Each woman must fight to maintain her dignity in the face of the humiliation that life inflicts upon her. Each woman possesses an astounding determination.

Marie NDiaye was born in 1967 in France, the daughter of a French mother and a Senegalese father. She studied linguistics at the Sorbonne and won a French Academy scholarship for a residence at the Villa Medici in Rome. She published her first work, Quant au riche avenir [As for the Promising Future] at the age of 17. She received literary acclaim with En famille [A Family Affair]. She also writes novels for children and is a playwright.

Personne, Gwenaëlle Aubry (Mercure de France)
Viewed from twenty-six angles, but with an empty centre, No one is the portrait of a man without a self, a melancholic (or, in harsher, less literary terms, a manic-depressive). From “A” for “Antonin Artaud”, taking in “C” for “Clown”, “K” for “Kabyl” or “H” for “homeless” right through to “Z” for “Zelig”, we witness the successive roles into which he projects himself – a procession of doubles, a population of masks contained by a single man. As the rugged inner landscape of melancholy takes shape, letter by letter, the “me” that emerges proves to be more of an “us” or a “them”. This alphabet is also an ABC of memory and the impossibility of coinciding with childhood words. No one is a place where absence unfolds as the identity of a man whose incapacity for solidarity with himself has left space for all the others within him. Lastly, it is a mask, a persona adopted by a living being to give voice to the dead, and by literature to convey madness.

Dr Gwenaëlle Aubry studied at the École Normale Supérieure and Trinity College Cambridge and is now a research professor in philosophy. A contributor to many works of philosophy and ideas, in 1999 she published her first novel, Le Diable détacheur, followed in 2002 by L’Isolée.

Le Bureau du livre de Londres,
Laure de Vaugrigneuse
Hannah Gregory