Many books are published during the year. Fortunately, summer often gives us the time to fish out some of those titles that we haven’t had time to read, to finally immerse ourselves in them, before the 459* new novels that will be flooding into bookstores at the start of the school year. Here is a selection of novels or stories published since January to slip into our summer suitcases.
10 – Linn Ullmann: Girl, 1983 (Christian Bourgois)
The daughter of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann has become a successful writer. With Girl, 1983, she signs her best text: when, as a teenager, accompanying her actress mother to New York, she decides to try her hand at modeling, and ends up spending a night with the photographer without his real consent. A fascinating, poignant, disturbing text, on this famous “gray area” that we talk about so often.
9 – Phoebe Hadjimarkos-Clarke: Alien (Basement)
The revelation of the year, Aliène, published in January, received the Prix du Livre Inter in the spring, and that didn’t surprise us. In this futuristic novel featuring Fauvel, a lonely girl who lost an eye during the Yellow Vest protests, and Aliène, a cloned dog, in a countryside haunted by dangerous hunters, the young Franco-American author demonstrates wild freedom and fantasy. A tale that is strangely as dark as it is luminous.
8 – Nicolas Mathieu: The Open Sky (Actes Sud)
A magnificent love story, or rather about love in all its facets, which Mathieu’s writing, as lyrical as it is mastered, makes spin circularly like an existential kaleidoscope. The relationship with a married woman, life as a couple, the bond with one’s child, that with one’s father… Or the turn of a life in which love is the only possible key to finally living in the “open sky”.
7 – Kim Fu: Five Girls Lost Forever (Heliotrope)
One of the discoveries of the year. Canadian Kim Fu, now living in Seattle, has written a second novel worthy of Joyce Carol Oates or Laura Kasischke, in which she follows, over thirty years, the adulthood of young girls who experienced a tragedy during a summer at a holiday camp. Will the event remain a childhood trauma? Or will it have repercussions on these future young women, to the point of ruining their lives?
6 – Reiner Stach: Kafka – The Youthful Years (Le Cherche-Midi)
A biography that reads like a saga, almost a detective novel, which reconstructs all the fluctuations of Franz Kafka’s psyche – grappling with his time, Prague at the beginning of the century, Judaism and anti-Semitism, his family, his loves, his friends, the First World War, the tuberculosis that killed him exactly one hundred years ago this year – which led to the creation of one of the most enigmatic and significant literary works of modernity. This third volume is almost a beginning, since it plunges us, against all expectations, into the childhood of the father of The Metamorphosis.
5 – Simon Johannin: Here begins a love (Allia)
A dive into Marseille, the trendy city par excellence where artists and bobos have flocked during the Covid-19 epidemic, through the wanderings of a young man in love. The narrator goes from bar to club, from meeting to appointment, from dialogue to discussion, to explore each stratum of society as well as each detour of his psyche. An initiation novel carried by writing as poetic as it is raw. Virtuoso.
4 – Michelle Zauner: Crying at the Supermarket (Christian Bourgois)
Among the stories of a dual belonging, of a family whose parents are immigrants, and displaced people – a publishing trend in Great Britain and the USA – Michelle Zauner’s book remains the one we loved this year. At the head of the Japanese Breakfast group, Zauner, born in Seoul in 1989, grew up in the USA. She tells the story of the life of an American-Korean family, as moving as it is funny, through her deceased mother. A Korean mother is as tough and loving as she is endearing. Very beautiful.
3 – Édouard Louis: Monique escapes (Seuil)
The happiest, brightest book by Édouard Louis, who is building a work of escape – how to leave, how to free oneself? – through his life and that of his family. In this case, his mother, Monique, who after Combats et métamorphoses d’une femme, finds herself locked up again by a violent man, and who will free herself thanks to the help of her son to be reborn and finally become herself: free, light, fanciful. A kind of tender and contemporary Bonnie and Clyde.
2 – Zadie Smith: The Imposture (Gallimard)
Without a doubt, her best novel, The Imposture takes us on a journey through space and time. It is a dive into Dickens’ England while revealing what it, through its art and literature, hid: the great English fortunes – and society in general – are based on slavery practiced on the sugar plantations in Jamaica. It breathes new life into characters who existed, via short, ultra-contemporary, and rhythmic chapters. Finally, an exploration of the links between two islands, England and Jamaica, by an Anglo-Jamaican novelist.
1 – Beata Umubyeyi Mayor: The Convo i (Flammarion)
The year began with this exceptional text: an investigation into the traces of these humanitarian convoys that saved children from the genocide in Rwanda, and of these same children, who became adults and were scattered across several countries. Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse was one of these survivors, and she has written a narrative non-fiction text worthy of the greatest masters of the genre.
