Editions Grasset & Fasquelle 61 rue des Saints-Pères, 75006 Paris, France
LONDON BOOK FAIR 2020
Heidi Warneke Rights Director [email protected]
Gabriela Panaget Christiaan van Raaijen Rights Manager Rights Manager [email protected] [email protected]
CONTENTS
FICTION
HIGHLIGHTS
Frédéric BEIGBEDER L’Homme qui pleure de rire 5
Grégoire DELACOURT Un jour viendra couleur d’orange 6
Gaëlle NOHANT La Femme révélée 7
Katharina VOLCKMER The Appointment 8
FIRST NOVEL
Salomé BERLEMONT-GILLES Le Premier qui tombera 9
Pauline CLAVIERE Laissez-nous la nuit 10
Sébastien CHAUZU Modifié 11
Maurizio SERRA Amours diplomatiques 12
LITERARY FICTION
Christophe BATAILLE La Brûlure 13
Elisabeth BARILLE L’Ecole du ciel 14
Tancrède VOITURIEZ Piraterie 15
Johann ZARCA Chems 16
UPMARKET AND WOMEN’S FICTION
Eliette ABECASSIS Nos rendez-vous 17
Laetitia COLOMBANI Les Victorieuses 18
Adrien GOETZ Intrigue en Egypte 19
Mathieu MENEGAUX Disparaître 20
Antoine SENANQUE Que sont nos amis devenus ? 21
2
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION
Hugo BORIS Le Courage des autres 22 Oscar COOP-PHANE Morceaux cassés d’une chose 23
GRAPHIC NOVELS
CATEL Le Roman des Goscinny 24
Dany LAFERRIERE L’Exil vaut le voyage 25
REMINDERS
Laurent BINET Civilizations 26
Hugo BORIS Police 27
Sorj CHALANDON Une joie féroce 28
Gaël FAYE Petit pays 29
Olivier GUEZ La Disparition de Josef Mengele 30
NON-FICTION
HIGHLIGHTS
Vanessa SPRINGORA Le Consentement 31
HISTORY AND GEOPOLITICS
Amir HOSSEIN JAHANSHAHI Le Grand Iran en marche 32 and Renaud GIRARD
Alain MABANCKOU Huit leçons sur l’Afrique 33
Anne SINCLAIR La Rafle des notables 34
Rithy PANH and Christophe BATAILLE La Paix avec les morts 35
3
CULTURAL HISTORY AND SOCIAL ISSUES
Alain Baraton My Paris gardens 36
Stéphanie CHAYET Phantastica 37
Anne-Sophie JAHN Bob Marley and the Dictator’s Daughter 38
Marc NEXON La Traversée de Pyongyang 39
Bruno PATINO La Civilisation du poisson rouge 40
BIOGRAPHY
José ALVAREZ Helmut & June, la dernière session 41
Thierry THOMAS Hugo Pratt, trait pour trait 42
PHILOSOPHY AND ESSAYS
Pascal BRUCKNER Une brève éternité 43
François JULLIEN L’Inouï 44
François L’YVONNET François Jullien 45
Michel ONFRAY La Résistance au nihilisme 46 Contre-histoire de philosophie, vol. 12
REMINDERS
Marc JEANSON and Charlotte FAUVE Botaniste 47
Ginette KOLINKA and Marion RUGGIERI Retour à Birkenau 48
Amin MAALOUF Le Naufrage des civilisations 49
Rithy PANH and Christophe BATAILLE L’Elimination 50
4
L’Homme qui pleure de rire
THE LAUGH-CRYING MAN
Frédéric Beigbeder
HIGHLIGHTS January 2020 – 256 pages
After 99 Francs, and Au Secours, pardon! (both translated all over the world), this new novel will be the third volume of Octave Parango’s adventures, and is set in current-day society. For now, the plot remains a well-guarded secret...
Octave Parango was a copywriter in the 1990s and a fashion model scout in the 2000s. Today, in the late 2010s, in a world that has greatly changed, we find him at it once again. This time, in a brand-new career...
After portraying the tyranny of the advertising world in 99 Francs and the commodification of feminine beauty in Au secours pardon, this new, satirical, hilarious and hopeless novel rounds out the Octave Parango trilogy and its depiction of contemporary alienation. Sadly, everything in this playful yet disenchanted parody of our société du spectacle is true and comes from first-hand experience.
• Frédéric Beigbeder is the author of ten novels, including the renowned 99 Francs, Windows on the World (Prix Interallié, 2003) and Un roman français (prix Renaudot, 2009). He has also directed the film L’Amour dure trois ans (2011, based on a script by him, adapted from his eponymous novel), and L’Idéal (2016, based on his own script, adapted from his novel, Au secours pardon). In addition to this, he has written the scripts for five films and documentaries and is a literary critic for both Le Figaro Littéraire and the famous French radio show, Le Masque et la plume.
Rights sold: German (Piper), Lithuanian (Tyto Alba), Macedonian (Tri), Romanian (Trei Editura), Russian (Gorodets), Serbian (Booka). Under offer: Bulgarian, Korean.
Rights sold for previous titles: Albanian (Shtepia Botuese), Armenian (Antares), Azerbaijani (Qanun), Bosnian (TDK), Bulgarian (Colibri), Castilian (Anagrama), Catalan (Ara Libres), Chinese (Shanghai 99, China Citic Press), Croatian (Ocean & More), Czech (Garamond), Danish (Egmont), Dutch (De Geus Uitgeverij), English (UK | Harper Collins), Estonian (Varrak), Finnish (Like), German (Piper), Georgian (Paltira), Greek (Astarti), Hebrew (Babel), Hungarian (Europa), Italian (Mondadori), Islandic (Forlagid), Italian (Bompiani), Japanese (Kadokwa, Kawade Shobo Shinsha), Korean (Chong-Ye Won), Latvia (Zvaigzne), Lithuanian (Tyto Alba), Macedonian (Tri), Montenegrin (Nova Knjiga), Polish (Noir sur blanc), Portuguese – Brazil (Record), Portuguese – Portugal (Presenca), Romanian (Pandora-Trei), Russian (Azbooka-Atticus), Serbian (Booka), Slovene (Vale Novak), Thai (Bluescale), Turkish (SEL), Ukrainian (Krajina Mriy), Vietnamese (Nha nam).
5
Un jour viendra couleur d’orange
ONE DAY WILL COME ORANGE COLORED
Grégoire Delacourt
HIGHLIGHTS April 2020 – 272 pages
Chapter by chapter the bestselling author Grégoire Delacourt adds colors to the monochrome portrait of contemporary France, chased by anger and torn by unrest. Pierre didn’t ask for much in life, but with his wife Louise and their son Geoffrey they are two steps away from losing everything. But even then, they chose to fight and struggle for the best. A portrait of society, a love story and an initiation novel, Un jour viendra couleur d’orange masterfully orchestrates the drama of its characters, their dreams and fears; despite the surrounding chaos, it leaves hope. Gripping and radiant.
An early November morning in the North of France a group of friends decides to occupy a traffic circle. For Pierre, a part-time security guard in a supermarket, this is a way to let out the long- suppressed anger. Wearing the yellow vest of the protesters strangely makes him feel alive. Over the days of protests that follow he drifts away from his wife Louise, a hospice nurse, and their thirteen-year-old son Geoffrey. A unique child, silent and autistic, Geoffrey refuses to be touched, arranges objects by color, measures the exact length of his strides and remembers everything he reads. When Pierre forces Geoffrey to throw a Molotov cocktail in a public building, Louise decides to leave him, exhausted by the violence he incites and determined to protect their son.
Abandoned by his friends, Geoffrey develops romantic feelings for Djamila, a young girl, living under the yoke of her older brothers, radicalized and defying the France that rejected them for too long. Together they leave for the woods where an old Armenian hermit, who made the forest his home, will hide them from the violence of the world.
In the meantime, Louise falls in love with one of her patients, Aurélien, whom she will accompany through his last days.
Pierre’s rage, the selflessness of Louise, the singularity of Geoffrey, the submission of Djamila and the renunciation of Hagop – all these personal battles will collide and interfuse, proving that even in the most desperate situations there is always a place for hope.
• Grégoire Delacourt is the author of several acclaimed novels, that include L’Ecrivain de la famille (2001, Prix Marcel Pagnol, Prix Rive Gauche, Prix Carrefour du Premier Roman, Prix Coeur de France), La Liste de mes envies (2002, Prix Méditerrannée des lycéens, Prix Livresse de Lire), translated into 35 languages and made into a theater play, and On ne voyait que le bonheur (2014, Prix des lectrices Edelweiss, Meuilleur roman de l’année), adapted to a theater play in the framework of the Festival d’Avignon. His previous novel Mon Père was published in 2019.
6
La Femme révélée
THE REVEALED WOMAN
Gaëlle Nohant
January 2020 – 400 pages HIGHLIGHTS
Paris, 1950. Eliza Donneley has gone into hiding and lives in a shabby hotel under a false name. Overnight, she abandoned a dream life in Chicago, complete with a rich husband and a beloved son. Why did this woman run away and risk of losing everything? After the great success of her past novels, Gaëlle Nohant returns with a suspenseful portrait of a woman and her quest for freedom. A true Hitchcockian heroine.
Quickly stripped of all her possessions, disoriented and alone in an unknown city, Eliza has become Violet. She must reinvent herself. After several encounters, she finds a job as an au pair and sets out to explore a grey, post-war Paris – but one that suddenly lights up with her newfound lust for life... all to the rhythm of the jazz clubs along Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Violet tames the city through the lens of her camera and captures the humanity of its meek and invisible denizens. In this fragile life, weighed down with secrets, she discovers a new strength and freedom within herself, forging deep friendships and finally allowing herself to experience passionate love.
But is it possible for her to live, deeply wounded by the desire to see her son again and by the pain of exile? How can she calm the panic that pushed her to flee her country and loved ones? And, above all, how can she forgive herself for having left? Twenty years later, in the spring of 1968, Violet finally returns to Chicago. She finds a city that is seething with anger, inflamed by the civil rights movement, protests against the Vietnam War, and the assassination of Martin Luther King. After parting in search of her son, she is pulled into the riots that rage throughout the city. Once again, Violet takes every risk and accepts her fate with determination, whatever the sacrifice may be...
• Gaëlle Nohant has published three novels, including the bestselling novel La Part des flammes in 2015 (160,000 copies sold; Prix France Bleu/Page des libraires 2015 and Prix des lecteurs du Livre de Poche 2016) and a biographical novel on Robert Desnos, La Légende d’un dormeur éveillé in 2017 (50,000 copies sold; Prix des libraires 2018).
7
The Appointment (previous title: A Jewish Cock)
Katharina Volckmer
September 2020 – approximately 140 pages
HIGHLIGHTS
The Appointment is a hilarious, rough and explosive monologue about sexual and national identities.
Her legs spread, a young woman is being examined by Dr Seligman. She can hardly see the top of his head whilst she tells him all about her life and her desires, her struggles with her sexuality and her identity. Born and raised in Germany, she has moved to London a few years ago to try to break free from her origins when the recent death of her grandfather, and an unexpected inheritance, make her realise that some things will stay with her forever.
In this outstanding monologue the narrator not only befriends Dr Seligman but also tells us about Mr Shimada (designer of the latest Japanese sex machines), Jason (the narrator’s despairing and incompetent therapist) and K (a married man who will change the narrator’s life forever in a public toilet).
From Hitler to oral sex, overbearing mothers and squirrel tails, Katharina Volckmer takes us on a wild journey where identities are questioned in a continuous search for freedom. A powerful and eruptive debut by an exceptional new literary voice.
• Katharina Volckmer was born in Germany in 1987. She now lives in London where she works for a literary agency. Written in English, A Jewish Cock is her first novel.
Rights sold: Castilian (Anagrama), Catalan (La Campana), Dutch (Arbeiderspers), English (UK: Fitzcarraldo, US: Avid Reader Press), Italian (La Nave di Teseo), Croatian (Fraktura), Russian (Corpus).
8
Le Premier qui tombera
THE FIRST TO FALL
Salomé Berlemont-Gilles
January 2020 – 288 pages
When 11-year-old Hamadi leaves Guinea for France, the future seems bright, but nothing turns out as planned. Instead there is a loss of social status and a descent into delinquency and alcoholism. Hamadi joins the ranks of those who find that France’s egalitarian promise of a better future is never honoured.
When he flees Conakry with his family to escape the regime of Sékou Touré, Hamadi is eleven years old and has everything going for him: parents who love each other, a respected father popularly known as ‘The Surgeon’, a kind and beautiful mother who treats him as her favourite, and three brothers and sisters whom he already feels responsible for. Forty years later, he is a broken man yelling on a stretcher in a Parisian hospital, blind drunk for the umpteenth time. On that particular day, his brothers and sisters - those from Africa and the two who were born in France - decide to have him interned. Hamadi is no longer the eldest and the pride of the family, but rather its shame.
How did he end up here? How come that Hamadi loose it all when everything seemed to be stacked in his favour?
It is the familiar story of a family that loses its social status and falls on hard times. The father’s qualifications turn out to be worthless in France and he ends up working as a nurse in an old people’s hospice. They move out to a Parisian suburb where Marie finds a job in a supermarket. There, Hamadi becomes friends with members of ‘The Brotherhood’ - four good-time lads who like a fight, are tenderly cruel and initiate him into petty crime. He soon gives up on school and starts working for Serge, a local pimp and dealer. He watches over Serge’s girls at night in the Bois de Boulogne. They include Khadija, with whom Hamadi falls in love. He loses his head over her and is willing to do anything, even to put one of his brothers’ life in danger…
In this powerful debut novel, Salomé Berlemont-Gilles tells the story of the first fifty years in the life of a tender but strong lad who soon runs up against the barriers within French society and discovers that the words Liberty, Equality, Fraternity put up on every public building ring hollow. It is the story of a man in freefall, like so many other thousands in contemporary France. But it is also the story of the characters around him who battle to save him and themselves from a similar fate, sometimes successfully.
• Salomé Berlemont-Gilles is 26 years old and is a graduate of Sciences-Po in Paris. At the age of 20, she won a short story competition and published the novella Argentique, (Lattès, 2013). Le premier qui tombera is her first novel.
9
Laissez-nous la nuit
LET US HAVE THE NIGHT
Pauline Clavière
January 2020 — 460 pages
Spanning twelve months, from one spring to another, this masterful first novel takes us behind the scenes of the dehumanized world of French prisons – a world that is completely cut off from the rest of society and lives according to its own laws. But even the deepest darkness cannot block out the glow of fleeting moments of warmth and friendship. This work takes readers on a psychological and spiritual journey into the everyday lives of prisoners.
Fifty-year-old Max Nedelec runs a printing press that has fallen on hard times. One morning in April, everything changes when the police come knocking at his door. This is the beginning of all his problems. A lost batch of receipts, unpaid debts, a little cheating and a lot of bad luck... Justice comes swift and terribly. He leaves the courtroom in cuffs, unable to go home first. The verdict is final: twenty-five months in jail. On this beautiful spring day, Max enters the longest of nights.
In prison, time can be measured by the sound of gates opening and closing. There, two prisoners share a 9m² cell. There, the most illicit traffic takes place during the mass. There, men change name and shape. Alongside Max, we meet a gallery of characters both whimsical and tragic. There’s his cellmate Marcos, a giant with a golden heart; the Serb who sells and corrupts everything in his path; Bambi, a young Syrian at the mercy of the more powerful prisoners; “The Beast”, a trio of indomitable dealers; and Sarko, the true prison warden feared by both guards and inmates. In addition to these characters, one finds the other people populating this parallel universe like Françoise the doctor, the guards, the chaplain Nicolae, and the warden.
• Pauline Clavière is a journalist and radio host at one of France’s most popular stations, as well as a reporter for a weekly television show. Laissez-nous la nuit is her first novel.
10
Modifié
MODIFIED
Sébastien Chauzu
March 2020 – 280 pages
When Martha, a solitary and surly woman, meets a young disabled boy called Modified, her life is completely transformed. This debut novel from Quebec is a feast of emotion and humour which grabs hold of us, makes us laugh and cry, and won’t let go of us again. There is a new talent on the scene!
Martha Erwin, a fortysomething woman who has been in a relationship with Allan for a long time and prefers whisky to children and silence to long conversations, is leading a rather quiet existence in the heart of Canada. An ad hoc detective for an industrial company run by her uncle, her only ambition in life is to hang on to her independence. Admittedly, tailing company employees and living with two bundles of fur that are Allan’s dogs is not exactly what she’d always dreamed of, but Martha is good at making do with simple pleasures.
Until, that is, one winter’s evening when a boy answering to the name of Modified crosses her path. An adopted child who one senses is different to other people (his nickname comes from the ‘modified’ curriculum that he studies at school), who is entranced by snowploughs and who is himself a peerless shoveller of snow, Modified starts coming round to their house on a regular basis to clear their drive. This is not a welcome development for Martha, who is engaged in the most delicate assignment of her career: to clear the name of Daniel Erwin, her cousin and a heir to the business empire, who has been accused of murdering his football coach. For somebody who doesn’t like family, her life is starting to get distinctly complicated…
By turns hilarious and moving, tender and mordant at the same time, Modifié is one of those books you never forget once you have read it.
• Sébastien Chauzu is a teacher at a secondary school in New Brunswick, Canada. Modifié is his first novel.
11
Amours diplomatiques
DIPLOMATIC LOVES
Maurizio Serra
April 2020 – 320 pages
Frustrated passions and thwarted love affairs lie at the heart of this atypical novel which interweaves three embedded stories that are independent of each other in time and space. Echoing the inner torment of his characters, Maurizio Serra takes us on a tour of countries in crisis from Japan to Italy and the Orient and offers us glimpses into the great geopolitical upheavals of the 20th century, drawing on his own lengthy career as a diplomat.
The first part, Avenue des Miracles is made of two overlapping stories. First, the turbulent attraction that the son of the most powerful political family in the imaginary ‘Oriental state’ of Michoumistan feels for a young ‘Western’ musician. Overlaid onto this clash of cultures and feelings is the chronicle of a country falling apart on account of tribal enmities, the greed of the major powers and the financial lobbies. The romantic failure of the protagonist coincides with the end of the nation that he has always loyally served. The story ends on a bitterly satirical note as it addresses the so-called ‘right of humanitarian intervention’, the disastrous repercussions of which are evident today.
The second part, Monsieur Hitaki, recounts the affair between the Japanese cultural attaché in Rome and the wife of the ‘Great Poet’, who is the absurd embodiment of the artist ensconced in his ivory tower as the war rumbles on outside. The story unfolds in three stages: their meeting in the fascist Italy of 1940-1943 up until their inevitable separation at the end of the war; a snapshot of the life of the protagonist, who is now remarried and is the father of two children, in the Japan of the 1960s; and finally, his reunion with the American daughter of his beloved.
The third part, La Crête, which takes place in the present day in French-speaking Switzerland, also features two overlapping stories. One consists of the confessions of a grand upper class and alcoholic lady who has just lost her husband after a visit to a euthanasia clinic. The other is the involuntary confession of an ambassador and a friend of the couple who looks back over the major triumphs and failures of his career - an allegory of a life that he had never lived to the full.
• A bestselling biographer Maurizio Serra is a diplomat. With Amours diplomatiques, he adds a further instalment to a masterly panorama that began with Malaparte vie et légendes (2011 – Prix Goncourt de la Biographie and Prix Casanova) and was followed by Italo Svevo ou l’antivie and D’Annunzio le Magnifique (2018, Prix Chateaubriand et Prix du Livre incorrect). In January 2020 he became a member of the Académie française.
Rights sold for previous titles: Castilian (Tusquets, Forcola Ediciones), Italian (Neri Pozza, Nino Aragno & Marsilio Editore), Serbian (Sluzbeni Glasnik).
12
La Brûlure
THE BURN
Christophe Bataille
March 2020 – 160 pages
Inspired by a true story, Christophe Bataille recounts a powerful tale of suffering and gradual recovery that echoes his previous works. A cry of revolt confronting us with a new reality: global warming and its consequences on the Planet.
It is a hot day in the end of summer. A man climbs a thirty meters high beech tree that dominates the countryside. He is a tree “doctor”, masterly and concentrated on his work. From up high, he gazes over the meadows and trees scorched by the sun. Like the rest of us, he is watching nature and the animal world change, helpless to do anything about it.
But an enemy is waiting for him, one which he has never encountered before: thousands of Asian hornets who are newcomers to this endless season. Rushing to get down to join his team he is attacked and stung hundreds of time. The pain is overwhelming, and he falls and – miraculously – survives.
In the first part of the book, Les Grandes chaleurs, Christophe Bataille presents the life of this man and the accident, recounted in turn by the man and his wife. She remains at his bedside, tends to him and recounts his gradual recovery. In the second part, La Brûlure, the author recounts the experience from the point of view of the man who survived. It is a bold diptych written in sumptuous prose.
• Christophe Bataille is a writer and an editor. His works include Le Maître des heures (1997), Vive l’enfer (1999), J’envie la félicité des bêtes (2002), Quartier général du bruit (2006), Le Rêve de Machiavel (2008) and L’Expérience (2015). With Rithy Panh, he is the co-author of L’Elimination (2011) et La Paix avec les morts (2020), and with Charlotte Rampling – of Qui je suis (2015).
Rights sold for previous titles: Castilian (Tusquets), Dutch (Vassallucci), English (New Direction Publishing), Greek (Astarti), Italian (Einaudi), Japanese (Suisei-Sha), Korean (Munhakdonngne, Random House Korea), Romanian (Lider).
13
L’Ecole du ciel
THE SCHOOL OF OPEN SKIES
Elisabeth Barillé
March 2020 – 234 pages
In The School of the Open Skies Elisabeth Barillé serves up a tender and poetic story about the discovery of a little-known, self-taught painter called Aimée Castain. A shepherdess and daughter of sharecroppers, she devoted her life to her flock and to observing the landscapes of Haute-Provence. An apprenticeship in the ‘school of the open skies’...
As the novel opens, the narrator and her partner Daniel are making plans to leave their respective cities, Paris and Marseille. To escape from their exhausting urban existences, they take refuge in Banon, a small village on a hill in Provence. They move into a modest little house where they soon discover paintings by an old shepherdess. As the months go by, Daniel develops a passion for the work of this forgotten artist born during the Great War. The artist’s name was Aimée Castain and the house they have just bought belonged to her… The couple gradually comes to appreciate the wonderful, misunderstood genius of the woman who lived within these walls...
Aimée Castain painted with grace the tender wildness of the hills, olive trees and dry-stone huts, as well as the misty, almost invisible sea lining the horizon some fifty miles away. Her sole obsession was to capture the beauty of the world on her canvases, and during her lifetime she enjoyed a brittle notoriety within the valley. A singular talent, the only trace of whom is now to be found in her paintings…
• Elisabeth Barillé is the author of several novels, biographies and essays, including Corps de jeune fille (1986), Exaucez-nous (1986 - Prix de la Fondation de France), A ses pieds (2006), Une légende russe (2012), Un amour à l’aube (2014), et plus récemment L’Oreille d’or (2016 -Prix Maurice Genevoix).
Rights sold for previous titles: Bulgarian (Iztok Zapad), Castilian (Argentine: El Ateneo, Espagne: Periferica), Lithuanian (Gelmes), Russian (Eksmo).
14
Piraterie
PIRACY
Tancrède Voituriez
April 2020 – 304 pages
Sometimes love’s mysteries echo the mysteries of the universe... With a magnificent and sensual style, Piracy mixes passionate love story and space opera.
In 1977, NASA decided to send two probes into space containing scientific tools, but also musical recordings and photos of Earth. Despite following their trajectory for years, scientists eventually lost track of them.
Breaking into NASA’s computers, Camille – a romantic, whimsical hacker and IT prodigy – could never imagine she might make such a discovery: not only has the Voyager probe – which left to explore the outer limits of the universe – not been lost for 20 years, it’s actually returning to Earth, propelled by an unknown force! Grace – an astronomer with a unique family structure – is chosen to intercept the probe via the International Space Station.
With Camille’s help, will Grace be able to resolve the enigma terrifying the world? And, will she establish first contact with intelligent life coming from afar? From Paris to Rio, from Houston to Baikonur, Piracy brilliantly blends an adventure novel with a love story. Will mankind finally be enlightened about its solitude in the universe? Or is Piracy ultimately an epic about love and words – an ode to human intelligence?
• Tancrède Voituriez is an economist and a novelist. The author of several acclaimed works, including Les lois de l’économie (2010), L’engagement (2010) and L’invention de la pauvreté (2013). He currently lives in Nigeria.
Rights sold for L’Invention de la pauvreté: Japanese (Hayakawa Publishing).
15
Chems
Johann Zarca
May 2020 – 260 pages
Isolation, need, relapse, disgust, reprise, threesome, foursome and more… Welcome to the world of chemsex.
When Zède, a journalist known for his works on the Parisian underground, decides to write about Jérome Dumont, gay artist famous in the 1980s, he has no idea that this project will almost cost him his life. Because along with his past Jérome will make him discover ‘chemical sex’, a practice consisting of using psychotropic substances during sex. Quickly Zède becomes a prisoner of the addiction to the augmented sex.
Extremely fast, trash and raw. From the first party to the last, we follow Zéde in his rapid and brutal chute. The extase that he finds in the vapors of indiscernibly named chemicals (3MMC, GHB…) and the need that follows progressively deprive him from his freedom and transform him into an animal chasing parties to get his dose. He goes out late, multiplies sexual partners, comes home at dawn under the appalled gaze of his son and his girlfriend, pregnant with their second child. At family dinners his parents are worried by his weight loss, his grey skin. His friends turn away seeing him prowling around at parties, wasted, offering sex to women he barely knows.
Written in first person in a raw, oral language Chems is 2020’s Requiem for a dream. A confession of a prisoner of joy, a journal of a hip thirty-something, ready to risk his family and his life for a moment of pleasure. This is also an investigation on the modern days’ plague that gains more and more victims and is currently becoming a social phenomenon impossible to ignore.
• An expert on combining fiction with gonzo-journalism Johann Zarca became known after receiving the Prix de Flore in 2017 for his novel Paname Underground (Editions Goutte d’Or). Chems is his seventh novel.
16
Nos rendez-vous
OUR RENDEZ-VOUS
Eliette Abécassis
January 2020 – 162 pages
FILM RIGHTS UNDER NEGOTIATION
In Nos rendez-vous, Eliette Abécassis, the author of several best-sellers, deploys her storytelling skills to tell the tale of a frustrated love affair between two people who met each other when they were too young and keep on missing opportunities to rekindle their relationship… before finally finding each other again.
Amélie and Vincent meet each other when they are still teenagers at the Sorbonne University in the late 1980s. It is love at first sight for both of them, but neither dares to admit it, fearing that they are unworthy of the other’s love. And so neither one of them makes the first move or has the maturity to seize this chance at happiness. A few weeks later, they arrange to meet but Amélie turns up late and so misses out on what should have been the great love story of her life…
Thereafter, they keep on bumping into each other, but are both caught up in the whirlwind of their own lives with marriage, children, work, travel and divorce… We follow in parallel their personal and professional lives, but each time fate brings them into each other’s presence, it turns out not to be the right moment.
They will have to wait for three decades, through many trials and tribulations, before they are finally mature enough to confess their feelings for each other and accept that they were always meant to be together…
• A writer, director and screenwriter, Eliette Abécassis is the author of over twenty books, including Qumran (200,000 copies sold), La Répudiée (100,000 copies sold) and Un heureux événement (150,000 copies sold), which has been adapted for the cinema.
Rights sold: Japanese (Hayakawa).
17
Les Victorieuses
VICTORIOUS WOMEN
Laetitia Colombani
May 2019 – 224 pages
Highly anticipated second novel by Laetitia Colombani, author of the international best- seller La Tresse, translated into 39 languages and sold over one million copies in France alone. Staying close to the topics that made her success and that she holds dear. Les Victorieuses is a novel about women, directed at women, written by a woman. Empathy, solidarity, and sisterhood are at the heart of this upmarket women’s fiction that so many will be able to relate to.
At the age of 40, Solène has sacrificed everything to her career as a lawyer – her dreams, her friends, her relationships... Until one day, when she breaks down and sinks into deep depression. While trying to get back on her feet, her psychiatrist suggests she try volunteering somewhere. Solène seems unconvinced, but nevertheless answers an ad to work as a “public scribe” for the illiterate. She is quickly disillusioned after being sent to a halfway house for women. Over the course of the following weeks, Solène discovers women with unique life stories from around the world. With Binta, Sumeya, Cynthia, Iris, Salma, Viviane, La Renée and others, she is slowly surprised to learn just how alive she really is and discovers her true vocation: writing.
Nearly a century earlier, in 1925, Blanche Peyron is on a mission. As a Captain in the Salvation Army entirely devoted to fighting poverty and economic instability for over forty years, and in spite of her fragile health and six children, she dreams of offering a home to women who have fallen through the cracks of society at a time when they are still unable to vote in France. Her struggle has a name: Le Palais de la Femme – “The Woman’s Palace”. She learns that a gigantic former hotel is up for sale in the heart of the city. It would be the ideal location for her project – but the owner’s price is very high. And yet, nothing can stop Blanche once she has a plan... With the help of her husband Albin, she will do everything in her power to gather the necessary funds to purchase and renovate the future Palais de la Femme.
• Filmmaker, screenwriter, actress, and novelist Laetitia Colombani is the author of La Tresse, which has sold over a million copies in France and has been translated into 39 languages. La Tresse has also been made into a children’s book and is currently being adapted into a film.
Rights sold: German (S Fischer Verlag), Castilian (Salamandra), Catalan (Salamandra), Korean (Balgunsesang), Greek (Patakis Publications), Italian (Nord), Japanese (Hayakawa Publishing), Dutch (Ambo Anthos), Portuguese (Intrinseca), Russian (Eksmo), Slovak (Ikar), Swedish (Sekwa).
18
Intrigue en Égypte
INTRIGUE IN EGYPT
Adrien Goetz
April 2020 – 304 pages
From Paris to Egypt, via Corsica, Adrien Goetz, along with his wonderful recurring heroine, Penelope, curator who now works in the Egypt Louvre, draws us into an intrigue that will reveal the best kept secret in History. The secret that links Napoleon Bonaparte and Nefertiti. An investigation through the mysteries of history.
In 1799, during his expedition in Egypt, Napoleon Bonaparte hides an object that will allow him later to conquer France.
In modern times, a burglary takes place in Reims. An Egyptian ring bearing the cartouche of Nefertiti disappears from the treasures of the coronation of kings. Penelope, who has just started her career at the Louvre, overlooking the collection of Egyptian jewels, is dispatched with great urgency to the archeological site of the Bawit Coptic hermitages. A mystery quickly rears its head: what secret ties the Bonapartes and the Bourbons, the key to which is said to be found in the country of the Pharaons?
Penelope and Wandrille hasten in search of the key to the affair, accompanied by charming new characters: Diane, an irresistible green-eyed blond who wants to marry Wandrille, the Director of the Louvre, a media doctor and a Corsican crook. We find ourselves transported at breakneck speed from Paris to Egypt to discover the secret of Napoleon’s talisman.
Erudite, funny and hectic, Intrigue in Egypt is the fifth artistic and historical investigation by Penelope, the ebullient museum curator, and Wandrille, the eternal freelance journalist who just cannot take himself seriously. This book is a great lesson on the history of art served in a form of a head spinning adventure.
• Adrien Goetz (Villa Kerylos, 2017) is the author of the famous series of Penelope and Wandrille's adventures, which began in 2007 with English Intrigue. A member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, he teaches History of Art at the Sorbonne and manages Grande Galerie, the official magazine of the Louvre.
Rights sold for previous titles: English (USA: New Vessel Press), Castilian (Vaso Roto), Danish (Arvids Forlag), Estonian (Eesti Raamat), Romanian (Cartea Romanesca), Chinese (China: The China Social Sciences, Taiwan: Azoth Books), Russian (A-Team), Czech (Host), Ukrainian (ECEM media).
19
Disparaître
DISAPPEAR
Mathieu Menegaux
January 2020 – 216 pages
What do a young woman who jumps out of her Paris apartment window one evening, and the corpse of a man found on a beach in the south of France – which, after spending several weeks in the water, is impossible to identify since the fingertips have been burned off – have in common? At first glance, nothing. And yet...
Paris on a summer evening... In Montmartre, the outdoor terraces are crowded, and a festive atmosphere fills the air. That is, until a cry rings out: a young woman’s body has just come crashing into the ground! The fall was so fast that no one saw it happen. The police quickly arrive on the scene. They rush inside the building and immediately identify the victim’s apartment – but it is locked from the inside. There’s no doubt about it: it’s a suicide.
A few weeks later, in the south of France... a jogger accidentally stumbles upon a man’s corpse that has washed up on the beach. The body’s time out at sea has disfigured it, and the fingertips have been burned off so it cannot be identified. It seems like an open and shut case of suicide.... But Captain Grondin, who is in charge of the case, can’t wrap his head around it. He needs to know what really happened.
What unites these two cases? Who could have taken such care to hide the drowned man’s identity? And why? What could possibly push a man and a woman to disappear?
• Mathieu Ménégaux is the author of three novels, all published by Grasset: Je me suis tue (2015) which won a prize at the Journées du Livre de Sablet, Un Fils parfait (2017 – Prix Claude Chabrol for Best Crime Novel), which was adapted for television, and Est-ce ainsi que les hommes jugent ? (2018 – Prix Yourcenar) currently being adapted for the screen.
Rights sold for previous titles: Italian (Giunti).
20
Que sont nos amis devenus ?
WHAT HAVE OUR FRIENDS BECOME?
Antoine Sénanque
March 2020 – 224 pages
With grace and humour, Antoine Sénanque offers readers an epic tale of friendship and love that takes the form of an action-packed detective story. A novel filled with surprises and colourful characters.
Pierre Mourange is a 52-year-old doctor, the head of a retirement house outside Paris, a distant father and husband. One day, he stumbles upon a handgun in his family therapist’s office. Out of curiosity, he picks it up and leaves his fingerprints. Bad luck. That same evening the psychoanalyst uses it to kill himself, making Mourange the perfect suspect... At least, this is what inspector Guise, a tiny man with a tiny IQ – but, unfortunately, tenacious – wants to prove. Mourange should be worried but, when all is said and done, wasn’t the retirement house already a prison?
The only problem is, Pierre Mourange does not want to leave his childhood friend and soulmate Camille behind: an eccentric writer and eternal bachelor with a lust for life who will never stop drinking whiskey, start exercising or eat organic food no matter what anyone tells him. The same goes for two seniors at the retirement house known as “the owls”: one is a former magistrate with a big heart, the other – a brilliant engineer specializing into hacking state servers. And then there’s Mathilde, his daughter whom he didn’t rescue one night long ago and fears he has lost forever.
But, far from imprisoning him, this affair will be liberating. It will reveal to him that his friends are willing to stick out their necks for him. It will also allow him to meet a chief of police and realize that he is still capable of loving someone. Pierre Mourange will eventually understand that his life – as well as his daughter – are ultimately not so far away.
• Antoine Sénanque is the author of seven novels. For his works he has received Prix Jean Bernard in 2007, Prix Découverte Figaro Magazine in 2008 and Prix Version Fémina in 2013. All his novels are published by Grasset.
Rights sold for previous titles: Italian (Barbes Editore & Edizioni Clichy).
21
Le Courage des autres
THE COURAGE OF OTHERS
Hugo Boris
January 2020 – 144 pages
A fight breaks out in public transport, and we are instantly turned into spectators... Faced with such banal events, we have all either acted courageously or cowardly. After over 15 years of observation, Hugo Boris paints the portrait of those little acts of everyday bravery and pays tribute to unsung, ordinary heroes.
Hugo Boris has just received his black belt in karate when he enters a suburban train and sees two people start to fight. Paralyzed and petrified, all he can do is sound the alarm. This episode scars him and reveals a deep-seated fear, mixed with a feeling of shyness and helplessness. Is this a personal character trait or a universal fear of confronting the Other? He grows obsessed with his fear. His wife suggests he go out and “get the crap kicked out of him once and for all” to exorcise it. Rather than let things get to that point, Hugo decides to spend fifteen years recording similar situations in a little notebook every time he sees fear reign in public transportation.
But he does not solely witness violence: he also describes delightful encounters, touching moments of dialogue, funny bits of banter... Through these serendipitous or tragic moments, he deciphers a slice of contemporary mythology (i.e., public transport) and attempts to tame his demons using his pen.
He also tries to overcome his own fear by witnessing examples of other people’s courage in every form, deeply admiring anyone who intervenes when a situation calls out to them, demands a gesture, or requires someone to speak out. His book is a tribute to those who had the guts he lacked. He even wonders, “Is courage contagious?” – for, often enough, when one person stands up to injustice, others follow suit.
Original, sincere and topical, this collection of brief texts hits a deep nerve. By laying himself bare, Hugo Boris writes about each of us: our daily moments of cowardice or unease, our epiphanies and, sometimes, our brief moments of heroism.
• Hugo Boris is the author of five highly acclaimed novels and is the recipient of several literary prizes. He published POLICE with Grasset in 2016, which won the Prix Eugène Dabit, as well as the Prix des Lycéens PACA, and has been translated into several languages. It is currently being adapted for the screen and will be released in April 2020 (directed by Anne Fontaine, with Omar Sy and Virginie Efira in the main roles).
Rights sold for Police: German (Ullstein), Spanish (Alianza), Russian (Ast) + film premier in France in April.
22
Morceaux cassés d’une chose
BROKEN FRAGMENTS OF A SINGLE THING
Oscar Coop-Phane
January 2020 — 128 pages
Some authors wait until the twilight of their lives before revisiting their first steps in life and in literature. Oscar Coop-Phane, however, decided that thirty was a good age to describe what a writer’s life is like today. In Morceaux cassés d’une chose, he contrasts our idealised image of this profession with reality. Drawing on autobiographical fragments, he shares his joys and his sacrifices and recounts an intense life that is taken to another level by the love of writing.
Oscar Coop-Phane mixes disparate memories from different stages in his life – his childhood, his adolescence, his adult life – to produce a fragmented account that is neither linear nor chronological. At first sight the focus might seem familiar: messing around in class, his schoolmates, discovering girls and literature, odd jobs (supervisor of schoolchildren, barman, dealer) to allow him to write, the first manuscripts, the rejections. And then suddenly success, his books in the bookshops, but the hardships also of being a writer, the interviews, the book fairs, the fear of not having a steady income.
But his story is also awash with little details that point to a deeper truth: the watch given to him by his mother which she claims is a gift from his father who has just abandoned the family home; the nice gesture by a waiter near his school who discreetly gives him back the note he used to pay for his lunch; the face of a girl one evening who, like him, gives the impression of hiding a scar; the disdain of a publisher or the surprised look of a reader who recognises him working in a bar while his face is in the newspaper.
These details speak of certain key events: a childhood marred by his rowing parents and their ultimate divorce; having to fend for himself for a place to stay and something to eat from the age of 16; the memory of another body inside him when he was a kid; the fear of never getting published and then of not being able to live from writing. And there’s also the beauty and the joy: the freedom in Paris, Berlin and Rome; the true friends and the company of other authors like Bove, Calaferte and Dabit; his first prize and the pride that went with it; meeting certain readers; a woman, love and then a child - his daughter. And always the writing.
A very eventful thirty years, and a lesson in courage as well as style, for Oscar Coop-Phane’s well- honed writing dazzles through its grace and its perceptiveness.
• Oscar Coop-Phane was born in 1988. He has published five novels: Zénith-Hôtel (2012 - Prix de Flore), Demain Berlin (2013), Octobre (2014) and, with Grasset, Mâcher la poussière (2017) and Le Procès du cochon (2018).
Rights sold for Le Procès du cochon: Arabic (Lebanon: Arab Cultural Center); Danish (Den Franske Bogcafés).
23
Le Roman des Goscinny T.1 : LA NAISSANCE D’ASTERIX
THE TALE OF THE GOSCINNYS V.1 The Birth of Asterix
Catel
August 2019 – 328 pages
Who out there hasn’t heard of Asterix, the world’s most famous Gaul, whose adventures have been translated into over a hundred languages? For the 60th anniversary of René Goscinny’s creation of Asterix, the illustrator Catel tells the story of the man behind the comic, a brilliant writer whom we can also thank for Le Petit Nicolas and Iznogoud, in a two-volume graphic novel.
Born in 1926 in Paris, René Goscinny was the creator of Asterix, Le Petit Nicolas and Iznogoud, and stands today as one of the world’s great historical figures of literature and comic books. But, behind this incredibly talented artist is a fascinating family history: Claude, the older brother, Stanislas and Anna, the parents, both Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine and Poland, all saved from deportation by fleeing to Argentina, but who lose many family members in the concentration camps. And Anne –his beloved daughter, whom he had with his wife Gilberte Pollaro-Millo – fatherless at the age of nine, who would go on to become a novelist in her own right as an adult.
From chapter to chapter, Catel alternates between Anne’s and René’s story. When René tells his story, his entire life flashes before our eyes: from his childhood in Buenos Aires, his youth in New York, then the war, and his first steps as an illustrator and scriptwriter, to his first triumphs. When Anne speaks, she returns to her relationship to her father, her memories, but also the heavy legacy he left behind.
Spread over two volumes, Le Roman des Goscinny tells both the moving, extraordinary story of a Jewish family from Eastern Europe at the heart of French art, and the incredible saga of modern European comics. Thanks to Anne Goscinny’s participation, Catel was given access to unpublished archives.
After graduating from the Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg, Catel began her career by publishing children’s books before turning to comic books and graphic novels. She is the artist behind Kiki de Montparnasse (2007, Grand Prix RTL de la bande-dessinée), Olympe de Gouges (2012, Grand Prix littéraire de l’Héroïne Madame Figaro) and Ainsi soit-elle (2013, Prix Artémisia), all of which have been translated into several languages. She also received the Grand Prix Diagonale-Le Soir for her work as a whole.
Rights sold: Dutch (De Geus), German (Carlsen).
24
L’Exil vaut le voyage
EXILE IS WORTH THE JOURNEY
Dany Laferrière
March 2020 — 408 pages
Following Autoportait of Paris with a cat, Dany Laferrière continues his exploration of the ‘drawn novel’ form. Exile is Worth the Journey offers an original perspective on the sense of exile: is it as terrible an experience as people say it is?
Here is Dany Laferrière in full exile mode. Forced to flee Haiti at the age of 23 with a pack of dogs barking at his heels, he embarks on a life of an exile, taking in Miami, Paris and Brazil without ever really having left Montreal.
Looking back on what people wrongly think of as fate, Dany Laferrière makes us appreciate that these forced travels, if we embrace them with an open mind, are a source of personal enrichment. What a wonderful opportunity they are to meet writers, women and cats! The world is replete with riches, and this book introduces us to them with charm and humour, and occasionally an understated lyricism: ‘I’ve just had a long conversation with my mother, and I have to leave without packing’.
Though exiles can be a wrench, they are also a chance to see the world and other cultures. Reading Jorge Luis Borges and Virginia Woolf, encountering solitary jazzmen and frequenting crowded cafés, and travelling across the Americas and Europe are enriching types of exile, which we experience chapter by chapter in the company of some of the great exiles of the world, including Ovid, Mme de Staël, Graham Greene, the great Cuban novelist José Lezama Lima and many others.
• The winner of the Prix Médicis in 2009 for L’Enigme du retour, Dany Laferrière has become a member of the Académie française in 2013. Grasset has published his Je suis un écrivain japonais (2008), Journal d’un écrivain en pyjama (2013) and Autoportrait de Paris avec chat (2018), his first graphic novel.
Rights sold for previous titles: Castilian (El Cuenco de Plata, Alianza, Pepitas de Calabaza), Chinese (Shanghai 99), Creole (Leve), Czech (Argo Spol), English (Arsenal Pulp Press, Douglas & McIntryre, Quercus), Danish (Turbine Forlaget), Greek (Thines), German (Das Wunderhorn), Italian (Gremese, 66th and 2nd), Japanese (Fujiwara Shoten), Korean (The Open Books, Thinking Tree), Polish (Swiat Ksiazki), Russian (Text Pulishers), Serbian (Laguna).
25
Civilizations
Laurent Binet
August 2019 – 378 pages
TELEVISION RIGHTS UNDER OPTION
Imagine Christopher Columbus had never discovered America and the Incas were the ones to come to Europe. This over-the-top – yet entirely plausible – story comes to us from Laurent Binet, cult author of HHhH and La Septième fonction du langage, both of which have been translated throughout the world. An instructive and entertaining book juggling with historical codes and literary styles.
Circa 1000 AD: Erik the Red’s daughter decides to head south. 1492: Columbus does not discover America. 1531: the Incas invade Europe.
What are the conditions whereby what has happened might never have? The Amerindians lacked three things that would have allowed them to resist the conquistadors. With horses, iron, and antibodies, world history would have to be rewritten. This hypothesis is at the centre of Civilizations.
Here, Atahualpa arrives in the Europe of Charles V. He finds the Spanish Inquisition, Luther’s Reform, and budding Capitalism. The miracle of the printing press and its speaking pages. Monarchies extenuated by endless warmongering, constantly under threat by the Turks. A sea infested with pirates. A continent torn apart by quarrels both religious and dynastic. But, most of all, downtrodden, starving populations on the brink of an uprising. Jews in Toledo, Moors in Grenada, German peasants... in a word: allies.
From Cuzco to Aachen, by way of the Battle of Lepanto, here is the story of inverted globalization which, ultimately, could have just as easily become our reality.
• Laurent Binet is the author of HHhH (2010 - Prix Goncourt for a First Novel), translated into 34 languages, and La Septième fonction du langage (2015, Prix du roman Fnac, Prix Interallié). He was a high school literature teacher for ten years.
Righs sold: Czech (Argo Spol), Portuguese (Brazil: Compahnia das letras, Portugal: Quetzal), Catalan (Editiones de 1984), Castilian (Seix Barral), English (USA: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, UK: Harvill Secker), Norwegian (Gyldendal), Korean (Inmungyeol), Russian (Ivan Limbakh), Italian (La nave di Teseo), Polish (Literackie), Dutch (Meulenhoff), German (Rowohlt Verlag), Turkish (Siren Yayinlari), Japanese (Tokyo Sogensha), Roumanian (Trei Editura).
26
Police
Hugo Boris
August 2016 – 198 pages
FILM PREMIER IN FRANCE IN APRIL 2020
A sweltering summer night. After an exhausting day, three police officers, Virginie, Érik and Aristide, accept to be part of a very special mission. The nearby detention centre is on fire, and illegal immigrants are being held there. One of these migrants is placed in their custody, making them responsible for bringing him across the border. When they discover their prisoner will most certainly be killed if he returns to his home country, each of them is confronted with an impossible dilemma, forcing them to confront their respective doubts. A claustrophobic, and superbly orchestrated story.
A Tajik man, whose request for asylum has been rejected, refuses to break his unsettling silence – despite the fact that his dossier states that his return home will be met with certain death. During a 25-km trip, the three officers will have to make a harrowing choice, led by Virginie, for whom these next hours are also crucial: at the crack of dawn, she has an appointment to abort the baby from her extra-marital affair with Aristide. He refuses, and is still trying to dissuade her. But the tragedy of this expressionless and terrified stranger shatters all their convictions…
How to be oneself, every day, every second, in today’s world? How to do the impossible job of having people respect order without abandoning one’s own principles? In this powerfully dramatic novel, Hugo Boris takes a highly tense story of four people holed up together, and condenses it into a few hours, where personal choice and collective responsibility collide.
• Hugo Boris is the author of four highly acclaimed novels: Le Baiser dans la nuque (2005), La Délégation norvégienne (2007), Je n’ai pas dansé depuis longtemps (2010) and Trois grands fauves (2013).
Rights sold: German (Ullstein), Russian (AST), World Spanish (Alianza).
Film rights sold. Leading roles: Omar Sy, Virginie Efira, Grégory Gadebois.
27
Une joie féroce
A FEROCIOUS JOY
Sorj Chalandon
August 2019 – 312 pages
FILM RIGHTS UNDER OPTION
Une Joie féroce paints the portraits of four women brought together by illness and who refuse to lie down and accept defeat. Their unity gives them strength and they are determined to do whatever it takes to fight illness and injustice, regardless of the personal costs…
Jeanne is forty years old. She is a gentle and discreet woman who has experienced the tragedy of losing a child. She is a bookseller and is well liked because she is a good listener and doesn’t talk a great deal herself - she is kind to others without ever asking them for anything in return. Her husband Matt is a case in point: she is familiar with his every gesture and expression, and yet he has never really shown the same interest in her. Then one day her world falls apart. ‘There’s something there’, says her doctor when her test results come back. And then comes the diagnosis: Jeanne has breast cancer.
Her husband can’t bear to see her in such a weak state, as her illness reminds him of all the loved ones he has already lost. He distances himself and leaves Jeanne to wage this daunting battle on her own. At the hospital she meets the ailing Brigitte who takes her under her wing and introduces her to her friends and fellow sufferers, Assia and Mélody. As she spends time with them, Jeanne gradually undergoes a transformation. Resigned at first, she now finds within herself a spirit of resistance, and they soon form an inseparable quartet of wayward women. Jeanne discovers a new zest for life, a streak of rebelliousness, a delight in this newfound feeling of power and a capacity for euphoria that she had never suspected in herself.
The four friends abandon all self-restraint and seemingly will stop at nothing to rein in the illness that is afflicting them and to re-establish order and balance in their lives, one of their first tasks being to regain custody of Mélody’s young daughter, who was spirited away by her father some years beforehand…
• A former international reporter who won the Albert Londres Prize (the French equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize) in 1998, Sorj Chalandon currently writes for the French satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné. He is the author of seven novels all of which have been published by Grasset, including Une Promesse (Prix Médicis 2006), Retour à Killybegs (Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie Française 2011), Le Quatrième mur (Prix Goncourt des Lycéens 2013) and Le Jour d’avant (2017).
Rights sold: German (Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag), Catalan (Ediciones de 1984), Greek (Enalios), Italian (Keller Editore).
28
Petit Pays
SMALL COUNTRY
Gaël Faye
August 2016 – 224 pages
Prix Fnac 2016 Prix Goncourt des Lycéens 2016 Prix du Roman des étudiants France Culture-Télérama 2016 Prix du premier roman 2016 FILM PREMIER IN FRANCE IN APRIL 2020
1992. Gabriel, is ten years old and lives in Burundi’s comfortable expat neighborhood, with his French father and his Tutsi Rwandan mother, and his little sister Ana. Gabriel spends the better part of his time playing with friends and having fun in the tiny cul-de-sac they have turned into their kingdom. This peaceful existence will suddenly shatter when this small country is brutally hit by war. In this magnificent coming-of-age novel, Gaël Faye describes an end of innocence and dives deep into the torments and questions of a child caught in the maelstrom of history.
Gabriel anxiously watches his parents separate, as the civil war looms in the distance, right before the tragedy of the Rwandan Civil War. His neighborhood is devastated. One wave of violence is followed by another, invading and destroying everything around him. Gabriel simply saw himself as a child, but he will soon discover he is mixed race, Tutsi, French…
Gaël Faye breathes life into a forgotten world of a child’s first years, with its joyful and secret moments – the scent of lemongrass filling the street, evening strolls in bougainvillea-lined byways, afternoon naps under perforated mosquito nets, futile conversations spent sitting on beer crates, termites coming out of the woodwork on stormy days... But also, and especially, to yell out to the universe that this world existed, with its simple existences, daily life, and gentle rhythms, before these men and women were forced to split and take sides or be exiled to the four corners of the world.
With its exceptionally extensive perspective, this first novel tells a dramatic story that the author knows first- hand. It is shot through with light and shadows, tragedy and humor, and characters who, each in their own way, try desperately to survive their tragedy.
• Gaël Faye is a writer, composer and rap artist. He is as influenced by Creole literature as he is by hip-hop culture and he released a music album in 2010 with the group Milk Coffee & Sugar. In 2013, his first solo album Pili Pili sur un Croissant au Beurre appeared. Petit pays is his first novel.
Rights sold: Arabic (Dar al Farabi), Basque (Igela Argitaletxea), Chinese (simplified: People’s Literature PH), Chinese (Locus Taiwan), Croatian (Meandar Media), Danish (Arvids), Dutch (Hollands Diep), Finnish (Like), Galician (Rinoceronte), German (Piper Verlag), Greek (Patakis), Hebrew (Modan), Hindi (Tara India), Icelandic (Angustura), Italian (Bompiani), Japanese (Hayakawa), Kinyarwanda (Rwanda Arts), Kirundi (Iwacu), Korean (EunHaeng NaMu), Lithuanian (Gelmes), Norvegian (Gyldendal Norsk), Polish (Foksal), Portuguese (Radio Londres), Romanian (Trei), Russian (AST), Serbian (Laguna), Slovak (Vydavate 318), Slovenian (Mladinska Knijga Zalozba), Spain - Castilian (Salamandra), Spain - Catalan (Empuries), Swedish (Norstedts), Turkish (Epsilon), Ukrainian (K.I.S.), Vietnamese (Tre Publishing House), World english (Chatto & Windus, Hogarth-Penguin Random House).
+ Film rights sold
29
La Disparition de Josef Mengele
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF JOSEPH
Olivier Guez
August 2017 – 240 pages
PRIX RENAUDOT 2017 FILM RIGHTS UNDER OPTION
After a 30-year manhunt, Josef Mengele, the torturing doctor of Auschwitz, and one of Nazism’s most emblematic figures, died in South America under mysterious circumstances. This powerful, geopolitical thriller is the result of an in-depth investigation of perhaps the Third Reich’s most secretive man and portrays the captivating deconstruction of the myth behind “the Angel of Death.” It invites readers to explore the depths of evil.
Hiding behind different names, protected by networks and his family’s money, and supported by a community in Buenos Aires that still dreams of establishing a Fourth Reich, Mengele believes he can invent a new life for himself. In Germany, it is a time of reconstruction. Peron’s Argentina is benevolent. And the entire world simply wants to forget. But soon the chase is on again, first by the Mossad, then by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. With the help of sympathizers, Mengele finds temporary refuge on a remote farm in Brazil. From then on, he will never have a moment’s rest. He survives through paranoia, but becomes the prisoner of his own hopeless situation. He will eventually be found dead, having drowned on a beach along the Brazilian coast.
How could the SS doctor possibly slip through the cracks of an international investigation spanning three decades? What complicity was there between West Germany and South America, and how did he benefit from it? This untold and disturbing story shines a light on geopolitical mutations, the way historical perspectives change, and the process by which the world learned about the Holocaust. Here, Nazi atrocities overlap with the modernity of the 1960s and 1970s, leaving us with our Western ambiguities. And with the question: what do we do with the men who have committed acts of evil?
• Olivier Guez is a writer, journalist, and screenwriter. His works include L’impossible retour, une histoire des juifs en Allemagne depuis 1945 (2007), Eloge de l’esquive (2014) and Les Révolutions de Jacques Koskas (2014). He is a regular contributor to Le Monde, Le Point, The New York Times and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In 2016, he received the German Film Award for Best Screenplay, for the film The People vs. Fritz Bauer.
Rights sold: German (Aufbau Verlag), Albanian (Albas Publishing), Bulgarian (Iztok), Castilian (Tusquets), Chinese (Haitian Publishing House), Croatian (Meandar Media), Danish (Den Franske), Dutch (Meulenhoff), English (UK: Verso Books), Estonian (Eesti Raamat), Greek (Kritiki), Hngarian (Muvelt Nep), Hebrew (Hakibutz Hameucad), Italian (Neri Pozza), Japanese (Tokyo Sogensha), Lithuanian (Zara Publishers), Korean ( The Open Books), Polish (Sonia Draga), Czech (Garamond), Slovac (Marencin), Romanian (Meteor Press), Vietnamese (Nha Nam Publishing), Portuguese (Brazil: Intrinseca, Portugal: Planeta Manuscrito), Russian (Knizhniki), Serbian (Carobna Knjiga), Slovenian (Mladinska Knjiga), Turkish (Profil Kitap).
30
Le Consentement
THE CONSENT
Vanessa Springora
HIGHLIGHTS January 2020 – 208 pages
In this intimate text exploring the question of sexual consent – at the heart of so many debates today – Vanessa Springora tells the story of a passionate affair in 1980s-era Paris between a teenager and a writer in his fifties. She describes an implacable process of psychological manipulation as well as the frightening ambiguity in which the consenting and loving victim finds herself. Beyond her own personal story, she also questions the excesses of an era and the indulgence of an artistic milieu that is blinded by talent and fame.
Paris in the mid-1980s. V. is thirteen years old. She is being raised by a single mother who is rarely present, and more invested in her career in publishing than in her daughter’s education. This teenage girl fills the hole left by her absent father with reading literature. One night, at a dinner party, she meets G.M., a writer with a scandalous reputation of which she is unaware. From the moment their eyes meet, she is mesmerized by the 50-year-old’s charisma, his infatuated glances, and the attention he lavishes upon her.
Several days later, she receives a letter from him declaring his “urgent” need to see her again. Omnipresent and passionate, G.M. ultimately reassures her: he loves her and will never do anything to hurt her. V. offers herself to him, body and soul. The intimidation of Child Protective Services who show up several times only reinforces their dangerously romantic idyll. But her illusions turn to devastation when she learns G.M. has always collected affair with adolescent girls, and even practices sexual tourism in countries where minors are vulnerable.
Behind the writer’s flattering façade hides a predatorial pedophile protected by members of Paris’ literary circles. V. tries to break free from his grasp while preparing to write a novel about their relationship. After their break-up, the nightmare continues as G.M. continues to reactivate V.’s suffering through publications of his own and relentless harassment.
• Vanessa Springora is an editor. Le Consentement is her first book.
Rights sold: Castilian (Lumen), Catalan (Empuries), Chinese (Thinkingdom), Croatian (Ocean & more), Czech (Host), Danish (Grif), Finnish (WSOY), German (Karl Blessing Verlag), Hebrew (Tchelet), Hungarian (Helikon), Icelandic (Benedikt), Italian (La Nave di Teseo), Japanese (Chuokoron-Shinsha), Lithuanian (Baltos Lankos), Portuguese (Brazil: Verus Publishing, Portugal: Alfaguara), Russian (Eksmo), Turkish (Alfa Basim), world English (Harper Collins).
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Le Grand Iran en marche
THE B IRTH OF GREATER IRAN
Amir Jahanshahi and Renaud Giraud
January 2020 – 208 pages
In the course of conversations with the international reporter Renaud Girard, the leading Iran specialist Amir Jahanshahi sets out a political and economic project for bringing stability to the Middle East. In his view, the birth of a Greater Iran whose influence extends from Tehran to Beirut, Baghdad and Damas would result in a resolution to the problems that are endemic to this region of this world.
In Le Grand Iran en marche, he explains how the map of the Middle East, traced out in the wake of the first and second world wars, is at the root of all the problems currently being experienced by this rich but cursed part of the world. In his opinion, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, founded in 1932, lacks the necessary legitimacy to be a regional leader unlike Iran, whose power rests on two essential pillars: it prestigious national history – and in particular its grand Persian heritage – and its Shia religion, the minority faith in the Muslim world.
Amir Jahanshahi then goes on to outline the political and economic benefits of a dominant Iran in the region. Though it may be difficult to imagine this given the very negative image that the country has in the West, such domination could nevertheless be a factor of stability and therefore be in the interests of Western powers. Finally, he warns that this reshuffling of the deck in the Middle East will happen one way or another anyway: either as a result of the collective intelligence of people of good will, or through its forceful imposition by Iran.
Throughout their conversations, Renaud Girard challenges him on his vision and his convictions so that we can form a clearer idea of the scale of the changes envisaged by Amir Jahanshahi.
• Renaud Girard is an international reporter who has covered every conflict in the Middle East since 1984. His books include Pourquoi ils se battent ? Voyages à travers les guerres du Moyen-Orient (2005 – Prix Montyon de l’Académie française), La guerre ratée d’Israël contre le Hezbollah (2006) and Retour à Peshawar (2010).
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Huit leçons sur l’Afrique
EIGHT LESSONS ON AFRICA
Alain Mabanckou
January 2020 – 224 pages
Alain Mabanckou is the first African writer to occupy the prestigious Chair of Artistic Creation at the Collège de France. In this book, he offers eight curious and erudite texts echoing his lectures there. What is “négritude”? What are some recurring themes in African literature? What is the relationship between colonialism and literature...? These are just some of the questions tackled by one of Africa’s greatest living French-language thinkers.
In 2016, Alain Mabanckou occupied the Chair of Artistic Creation at the Collège de France. It was the first time an African was invited to teach the often-disregarded literature and culture of the “dark continent”. As someone who has inherited Africa’s literary and cultural history, Mabanckou explores this heritage in these “eight lessons about Africa,” which he taught at the Collège de France. Mixing style and political vision, looking to literature – but also film and painting – Mabanckou’s Leçons establish a new perspective on the francophonie.
From racist caricatures to Aimé Césaire, the struggle from “darkness to light” has been long, and Huit leçons offers a calmer vision of Africa’s cultural relationship to the world. Far from being in competition with French culture, black, African, Haitian or American culture actually enhances it. “Négritude is not just a concern shared by some Black people with other Black people. It is a way to reconsider our humanity.”
This book comes with a brand-new foreword and two more recent publications by Mabanckou on Africa, including his famous open letter to the French President regarding the francophonie.
• Alain Mabanckou has been a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, he won the 2006 Prix Renaudot for Mémoires de porc-épic (Le Seuil), and is the author of several successful novels translated throughout the world, including Verre Cassé (Le Seuil, 2005) and essays like Le Monde est mon langage (Grasset, 2016). He has lived in Los Angeles for the past fifteen years, where he is a tenured professor of French literature at UCLA.
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La Rafle des notables
THE ROUND-UP OF THE NOTABLES
Anne Sinclair
Mars 2020 – 128 pages
When deciding to write about her grandfather’s past, Anne Sinclair discovered a little- known chapter in the history of Jewish persecution during the German Occupation of France: the concentration camp in Royallieu. With great emotion, the author brings these prisoners back to life in La Rafle des notables, many of whom would end their horrible journey in the gas chamber. Although the figure of her grandfather might lead us to believe this is a personal story, the family saga quickly becomes a historical investigation.
In December 1941, the Gestapo arrests 743 French Jews. They are directors, lawyers, writers, judges, in other words, notables. In Royallieu, near Compiègne, they are detained with 300 foreign Jews deported from Drancy. With its German administration, Royallieu is an authentic Nazi camp in France. Famine, lack of hygiene, diseases, horrible living conditions, and one of the coldest winters of the war lead to roughly fifty deaths. The end goal of this detainment is extermination, and the first convoy of French Jews to Auschwitz leaves from Royallieu in March 1942.
The population of the camp is composed of two very different groups: French Jews assimilated in French culture for generations and Jews coming from Central Europe, of modest origins, who have been chased out of their countries. There is also the difference between socio-economic status and, of course, the diverging perceptions of Judaism. For the notables, confusion reigns: they cannot fathom why they are being starved and locked up. The foreign Jews, however, are used to being persecuted. The confrontation between the two communities quickly dies down once it becomes clear they are all destined for the same tragic end.
As for Léonce – Anne Sinclair’s paternal grandfather and a small business owner interned in Compiègne – he is miraculously saved from deportation. After falling ill, he is transferred to the Val-de-Grâce hospital where his wife helps to get him free. They hide until the Liberation, when he dies at age 63 as a result of his internment.
• Anne Sinclair is the Editor-in-chief of the French Huffington Post and author of Une année particulière (1982), Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’eux (1997), Caméra subjective (2002), Chronique d'une France blessée (2017), as well as 21 rue la Boétie (2012 – 90,000 copies sold and translated into several languages) dedicated to her maternal grandfather.
Rights sold for 21 rue Boétie: Castilian (Galaxia Gutenberg), Dutch (De Bezige Bij), English (UK: Profile Books; ANZ: Text Publishing), German (Kunstmann), Italian (Skira), Korean (Yul).
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La Paix avec les morts
MAKING PEACE WITH THE DEAD
Rithy Pahn et Christophe Bataille
January 2020 – 180 pages
PRIX DES ECRIVAINS DU SUD 2020
Eight years after the international success and critical renown of their award-winning L’Elimination, Rithy Panh and Christophe Bataille return to Cambodia – a country modernizing so quickly that traces of the Khmer genocide that resulted in the death of 1.8 million victims have disappeared. This work of memory revisits one of the 20th century’s greatest massacres, in search of those who have disappeared.
Rithy Panh and Christophe Bataille invite readers on a peculiar journey, one that leads to childhood and the rice patties where 1.8 million Cambodians were killed as a result of ideology, violence and hunger.
Critically-acclaimed filmmaker, Rithy Panh, looks for the places where his loved ones are buried: his father’s tomb in the muddy trenches and the pit that swallowed up his mother and sisters, among others. But also the place where he desperately found shelter at age thirteen with the cows, where the Khmers Rouge dared not look.
Rithy Panh and Christophe Bataille travel throughout the country, speak to monks, question old villagers, and scour the ground, where they find bones and bloodstained clothes. They fight the threat of oblivion and, with it, the possible negation of history. They continue their voyage and try to make peace with the dead and forge a unique relationship with the living: the victims, persecutors, accomplices, and former Khmer Rouges officials.
From a written conversation with Noam Chomsky to a series of dialogues with Father François Ponchaud, from an interview with Robert Badinter to childhood letters tucked away in a leather satchel, and from a meditation on ideology to their visits with woman soothsayers, the authors offer us a fascinating – and necessary – book about memory and the history of a people.
• Born in Cambodia in 1965, Rithy Panh is a filmmaker. His work has been praised throughout the world, from S21 – The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine to L’Image manquante (The Missing Picture – Prix Un Certain Regard, Cannes 2013), and more recently Les Tombeaux sans noms (Graves Without a Name). Christophe Bataille is a writer and editor.
Rights sold for L’Elimination: Chinese (Shangai 99), English (US: Other Press), German (Hoffmann und Campe), Italian (Feltrinelli), Japonese (Gendai Shicho-Sha), Romanian (Corint), Spanish (Anagrama), Ukrainian (Ecem Media).
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Phantastica
PHANTASTICA
Stéphanie Chayet
February 2020 – 248 pages
Suffering from cancer, New York-based journalist Stéphanie Chayet, opted for an original and innovative form of treatment: consuming hallucinogenic mushrooms. Drawing on her own personal experiences, she retraces the history of psychotropic drugs and explains how they can open up remarkable new medical possibilities, providing their consumption is properly controlled. A contemporary issue, given that several major American cities have decriminalised the consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms in 2019.
In 2018, the US Food and Drug Administration granted ‘breakthrough therapy’ status to a molecule with promising properties for treating depression: psilocybin, the active agent in hallucinogenic mushrooms which along with its cousins LSD and mescaline was experimented with in the 1960s by leading psychiatrists from Harvard to Sainte-Anne in Paris. But these substances that the medical world saw as revolutionary were adopted by young people, prompting a government crackdown which paralysed research. They remain classified among the most dangerous drugs and are illegal almost everywhere in the world.
These days, the word psychedelic conjures up the Beatles, Woodstock and the 1960s. But etymologically it comes from the Greek psyche (the soul) and delos (visible), thus meaning ‘revealing of the unconscious’. And the original scientific name for these substances was the very poetic ‘phantastica’. But the science of psychedelic substances fell into oblivion with the ‘war against drugs’ of the 1970s. Stéphanie Chayet recounts how their medical use is currently undergoing a revival in the United States, endorsed by the most respectable scientific institutions. A remarkable story, which to date France has gone out of its way to ignore.
What happens in a brain under the influence of a psychedelic substance? What enduring effects can they have? In purely medical terms, they can be used to treat depression, calm the fear of dying and overcome addictions to opiates, tobacco and alcohol. Science has also revealed that the substances bring us closer to nature, to other people and to mysterious realms - they are like a soul supplement whose appeal is not confined to people suffering from illness. There is a fascinating revolution on the horizon, as well as a complete rethinking of the distinction we make between medicines and illegal drugs.
• Stéphanie Chayet is a freelance journalist based in New York. First conceived as an investigation for Le Monde, this project took shape after she was diagnosed with cancer and she revisited the subject from a more personal angle.
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La Traversée de Pyongyang
CROSSING PYONGYANG
Marc Nexon
February 2020 – 168 pages
This is the story of a man who runs tirelessly down the wide, windswept avenues of a deserted city in North Korea. In order to get there and run a marathon in the world’s most hermetically sealed capital, this French journalist had to lie about his true job. But crisscrossing Pyongyang is far more than a physical feat – it’s a confrontation with oneself and with the myriad aspects of a city unlike any other.
Welcome to this famous and silent capital, where glossy facades hide immeasurable pain and misery. During a marathon, Marc Nexon finds himself trapped in the oppressive atmosphere of Pyongyang, North Korea. Throughout the itinerary and on the sidelines, no laughing, no banners or inviting spectators cheer the runners on. At every intersection, grey, anonymous men supervise the runners. At the hotel, one of the floors is strictly off-limits. In one of the streets, he spots a row of military trucks. And everywhere, loudspeakers remind him that, in Pyongyang, no one is ever really alone. A life-size Big Brother.
Although he thinks he is prepared, the marathon baffles him and opens up a Pandora’s box of questions. What is this democrat thinking as he jogs through the most sequestered city in the world, wearing shorts and trainers made across the border in China? Does he of all people – a foreign correspondent who has covered the Eastern bloc throughout his career – believe in dialogue through sports? Does he encounter a different country than the one he imagined, between enormous statues and empty plains? Or, is this race a mad political act, a bizarre form of activism?
Nexon’s understated style brilliantly captures the glacial atmosphere of North Korea, only intermittently warmed by the occasional flash of light: a sign, a child’s smile... moments as fleeting as they are vital for him to reach the finish line.
• Marc Nexon is a foreign correspondent for French news magazine Le Point where he has largely covered the former Soviet bloc. He was awarded the “Prix de la presse diplomatique” in 2009 for his portrait of Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov. La traversée de Pyongyang is his first book.
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La Civilisation du poisson rouge
GOLDFISH CIVILIZATION
Bruno Patino
April 2019 – 184 pages
A short and brilliant essay on how inexorably declining attention spans have created a society - and a market - of addiction that is incapable of disconnecting from social media and new technologies.
The maximum attention span of a goldfish is 8 seconds - hardly time enough to do a circuit of its bowl as it is caught in the trap of eternal recurrence. We have become goldfish trapped in the bowl created by our screens, subservient to the constant dance of pokes and instant messages. A study in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology estimates the maximum time we can expose ourselves to social media and the rest of the internet to 30 minutes, before it starts to become hazardous for our mental health. All of us - children, young people, adults - are on the path to addiction.
Digital servitude is a model that has built new empires with relentless determination, even if it has not been planned out in advance. There is no technological determinism at the core of the reactor, but rather a project that reflects a new type of capitalist and an economy based on attention spans. It is about using time more productively to extract greater value from it. Having collapsed space, it is about stretching out time while simultaneously compressing it and creating an unending series of snapshot moments.
The general speeding up of things has replaced habit with short attention spans, and satisfaction with addiction. And algorithms are now the tools of this attention economy, which is gradually destroying our reference points. Whether it be our relationship with the media, the public arena, knowledge, truth or news, nothing escapes from this attention economy, which privileges reflexes over reflection and passions over reason. The Enlightenment is dimming in the shadow of digital signals and the attention market is the society of fatigue.
The time to fight back has come, not to reject digital civilization but to transform its economic nature and turn it into a project that abandons the transhumanist nightmare and rediscovers human ideals.
La civilisation du poisson rouge is a brilliant exposé of the dangers of prolonged use of all these new technologies that populate our daily lives, as well as an exploration of the strategies we can adopt to rid ourselves of our addiction.
• Bruno Patino is an editorial director at Arte France and runs the journalism school at Sciences Po in Paris. An expert in media and digital issues, he is the author of Télévisions, published by Grasset in 2016.
Rights sold for this title: Chinese (Beijing Qianqiu Zhiye), Finnish (Niin & Nain), Greek (Kastaniotis), Italian (Antonio Vallardi Editore), Portuguese (Gravida Publicacoes).
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Bob Marley et la fille du dictateur
BOB MARLEY AND THE DAUGHTER OF THE DICTATOR
Anne-Sophie Jahn
May 2020 – 260 pages
A result of a significant research, Bob Marley et la fille du Dictateur is an unprecedented investigation on a secret relationship between Pascale Bongo, the eldest daughter of Gabon’s dictator Omar Bongo, and the world star of reggae.
It’s 1979. Bob Marley is 34 and at the peak of his musical career. Pascaline Bongo, the eldest daughter of Omar Bongo, the president of Gabon, is 23. She just sneaked into a dressing room of the singer after one of his US concerts. He is surrounded by the numerous fans, desperately trying to get his attention, but Pascaline, tall and statuesque, favorite daughter of the almighty father, is not used to not being noticed. She proposes Marley to make a concert in Gabon for the birthday of her farther. The singer never played in Africa and dreams of going there. He says yes.
This is the beginning of a love story – the last one for Marley – between the legend of the reggae and an African princess. This relationship, kept secret for a long time, tying forever two lives in one, evolves on the background of the continent’s political history, decolonization, pan Africanism and the religion of Rasta.
• Anne-Sophie Jahn is a journalist and a constant contributor for Le Point. She has also worked for the New York Sun and the Franco-German TV channel ARTE. In 2018 she published Les Sept Péchés capitaux du rock (Flammarion).
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Mes jardins de Paris
M Y PARIS GARDENS
Alain Baraton
May 2020 – 400 pages
Paris, the universally famous city of monuments and museums, is home to an exceptional collection of parks and gardens. And who’s better than Alain Baraton, France’s most renowned gardener, to share with us their secrets and let us see the capital’s less known face?
This unique book tells the history of all the gardens of Paris. Alain Baraton, the gardener of Versailles, will be your passionate guide on a series of insolate walks through squares, parks, gardens, roseries and alleys. Walking by his side through the pages we learn about historical events, curious botanical details and improbable anecdotes from the life of the city.
This book is not a practical guide, but a journey through time and space on which the reader is taken through Roman Lutecia to modern-day China, and even the Moon, without ever leaving the world’s most beautiful city. Alain Baraton also shares with us his passion for conserving nature and offers a political perspective on city gardens as an archetypical public space.
From the cult parks – Luxembourg, Monceau – to less known gardens, sometimes miniature, sometimes secret, feminist gardens, enchanted gardens, gardens-cemeteries… he makes us discover an incredible unknown world.
• The Chief-gardener of Le Grand Parc de Versailles and Le Domaine national du Trianon, Alain Baraton is also a columnist. He is the author of Le Jardinier de Versailles (2006) and Camélia de ma mère (2017)? Both known and acclaimed in France.
Rights sold for previous titles: English (Rizzoli), Italian (Skira) and Japanese (Hara Shobo).
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Helmut & June, la dernière séance
HELMUT & JUNE THE LAST SESSION
José Alvarez
April 2020 – 416 pages
As a close friend of legendary photographer Helmut Newton and his wife June, José Alvarez paints an intimate, up-close portrait of a couple that would revolutionize the rules of photography and art of the second half of the 20th century.
As someone who was very close to Helmut Newton and his wife June for over fifty years, José Alvarez was entrusted with the delicate mission of writing the story of their lives. More than fifty years of friendship! He evokes the tragedy that struck the young Helmut Neustädter – a Jewish Berliner – much of whose work focused on the topic of disaster, as well as his encounter in Melbourne with June Dunbar, a young and well-known Australian actress whose career was cut short when they moved to Paris.
By following their respective destinies, the author tells the story of an exceptional couple united by the creativity. Two people whose intelligence, modernity, and freedom continue to fascinate and question our understanding of what it means to be a couple. Over the course of Helmut Newton’s work, the social and artistic reality of the period between 1960 - 1990 comes to the fore. Alvarez describes society that is not yet dominated by social media, where creative freedom was absolute and not subjected to the pseudo-morality that governs it today.
• José Alvarez was a founder and a director of Les Éditions du Regard since 1978. He is the author of several books and catalogues on architecture, art, design, and photography. He has also published two novels, Anna la nuit (2008) and Avec la mort en tenue de bataille (2016), as well as a book- length essay, François Pinault artiste contemporain (2018).
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Hugo Pratt, trait pour trait
HUGO PRATT, A PORTRAIT
Thierry Thomas
February 2020 – 256 pages
Born in Italy in 1927, Hugo Pratt is considered to be one of the world’s greatest illustrators. Works of this comic book prodigy include the cult adventure series Corto Maltese (1967). Hugo Pratt, trait pour trait is the first biography to be devoted to him, as well as being a literary celebration of a love for comics.
An acknowledged expert on the life and work of Hugo Pratt, Thierry Thomas pays homage to the artist in this original and literary essay. He explores the genius of the illustrator whose style is immediately recognisable, as well as describing the man whom he had the good fortune to know.
What is distinctive about Hugo Pratt’s art is his disdain for conventional distinctions between the intellectual and the entertaining or between high and low art. Therein lies his originality: in every one of his storyboards he challenges these nefarious categories. For those who despise arrogant notions of ‘official culture’, reading Corto Maltese is an exhilarating experience.
Hugo Pratt, trait pour trait is also an exploration of a love for comics and a reflection on its origins. Throughout his life Hugo Pratt fought for comics – often considered as profane and secondary medium – to be recognised as a form of art. Without pretension and acknowledging his own roots in popular culture, Hugo Pratt defined himself as a novelist who instead of writing his stories opted to draw them.
• Thierry Thomas is an author, scriptwriter and documentary filmmaker. An expert on the work of Hugo Pratt, he has made a profile of the illustrator for ARTE in 2016, written a scenario for an animated feature film La Cour secrète des arcanes (2002), adapted from the comic book Corto Maltese in Siberia and directed the publication of several anthologies dedicated to Hugo Pratt, as well as an annotated version of The Fable of Venice (the 25th adventure of Corto Maltese).
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Une brève éternité
A BRIEF ETERNITY
Pascal Bruckner
September 2019 – 272 pages
In 70 years, life expectancy has risen by 20 to 30 years. We live longer, and yet growing old is still viewed as a catastrophe. It is regarded as the age of wisdom, calm, and a farewell to spontaneity and passion – at least, that’s what old age is widely expected to be like. Is it possible for us to change the way we think about it and what it implies, as we are talking about an age when most of our ancestors already had one foot in the grave? After turning 60, the human animal experiences a certain suspension: neither all that young nor all that old, a prisoner stuck between two states. This temporary reprieve leaves life open like a swinging door. Since 1950, life expectancy has risen the length of an entire life in the 17th century – a statistic that changes our expectations of seniors and their image as wise elders. So many of them mimic the new generation in the hopes of seeming younger and cooler, while young folk imitate their elders in order to be taken seriously.
This confusion is symptomatic of a society that sees age as a category with a set of criteria that must be respected. Can’t we reinvent old age and its connotations? As time goes on, deadlines grow closer and possibilities dwindle – but there are still discoveries, surprises, and life-changing relationships to be had. Time has become a paradoxical ally: instead of killing us, it keeps us afloat.
Is it only a question of living longer, or more intensely? Of starting over or choosing a new path? What about remarriage, or a new career? How can one avoid the fatigue of existence, the melancholy of twilight? How can one go through great joys and great pains? Finally, what about the body – this ally that can turn against us from one day to the next?
Drawing from a range of sources, including reflections, factual statistics, literature, art and history, this book offers a philosophy of longevity founded on a determination to break the age barrier. In short, an art de vivre, a guide on how to live our thirty extra years. In Une brève éternité, Pascal Bruckner shows us that staying young means never letting the flame of desire die.
• Widely translated essayist and novelist, Pascal Bruckner, is a regular contributor to public debates in France and is the author of a considerable body of work, including Un bon fils, La Sagesse de l’argent, Un racisme imaginaire and Un an et un jour.
Rights sold: Romanian (Trei), World Spanish (Siruela), Italian (Ugo Guanda), Russian (Ivan Limbakh), World English (Polity Press), Castilian (Siruela), Korean (Influential).
Rights sold for previous titles: Arabic (Ceres, Obeikan), Bosnian (Buybook), Bulgarian (Liubomadrie, Gloria Mundie), Chinese (Haitian, East China Normal, SDX Joint, Athena), Croatian (Algoritam, Nakladni Zavod, DHK), Czech (Motto, Mlada Fronta, Pulchra), Dutch (Boom, De Bezige Bij), English (US: Princeton UP, Harvard UP, Algora | UK: The 87 Press, Polity Press, Dedalus), German (Random House, Aufbau), Greek (Astarti, Patakis), Hungarian (Szazadveg Foundation, Europa Konyvkiado), Italian (Ugo Guanda, Ipermedium Libri, Garzanti), Japanese (Hosei UP, Kanki), Lithuanian (Tyto Alba), Norwegian (Arneberg, Vidarflaget), Polish (Jagiellonian UP), Korean (Next Wave, Munhakdongne, Dongmoonsun, Jakkajungsin, Vega Books, Mujintree), Portuguese (Brazil : Editora Bertrand, Rocco Editora | Portugal : Gravida, Europa America, Medialivros, Noticias), Romanian (Trei), Russian (Ivan Limbakh,Machaon, Text), Serbian (Sluzbeni Glasnik, Beobook), Slovakian (Kalligram), Slovenian (Beletrina AP, Zalobza), Spanish (Impedimenta, Anagrama, Tusquets, Ariel, PPM), Turkish (Sel), Ukrainian (Ecem Media, Grani).
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L’Inouï
THE UNHEARD
François Jullien
January 2019 – 216 pages
Who has not at some point grown weary of the wonderful spectacle of the sky? Who has not realised the fading of their feelings for the person they once loved so dearly? L’inouï draws our attention to those things in our daily lives that we are no longer able to appreciate and yet remain very much there if we will only look.
The story told here is everyone’s story. Things that endure in time and recur incessantly always end up losing their lustre. Beauty and love are no longer experienced in all their force. The unheard, in François Jullien’s view, is that which has become buried and which we are no longer capable of hearing. We become indifferent to even the most beautiful of sunsets if we gaze upon it every day.
The challenge, then, is not to transcend things by appealing to something beyond reality, as classical metaphysics would have us do, but to open a breach, for everything is right there before our eyes! The trick is to rediscover that which sparkles and glistens, in the very banality of existence and in the simplest of phenomena.
To achieve this, we need to take a step back from the banal and the familiar, as well as from ourselves and language. In this new work, François Jullien forges a new tool to help us better understand what is going on inside us beyond ethics-related questions.
• François Jullien is a philosopher, a hellenist and a sinologist. His works have been translated into many languages.
Rights sold for previous titles: Arabic (Lebanon: Sud Editions), Bulgarian (Iztok Zapad, LIK), Castilian (Siruela, Arena, Libros Perfil, Bellaterra, El Cuenco de Plata, El Hilo de Ariadna), Chinese (Peking UP, The Commerical Press, Henan UP), English (UK: Seagull Books, US : Zone Books), Estonian (University of Tallinn), German (Suhrkamp, Merve, Passagen, Turia Kant), Italian (Einaudi, Il Mulino, Feltrinelli, Raffaello Cortina, La Scuola), Japanese (Kodonsha), Korean (Hanul, Dongnyok), Portuguese (Brazilian: Discurso Editorial, Editora 34; Portugal: Instituto Piaget), Russian (Progress-Tradition, Moscow Philosophy Foundation, Salikov & Co.), Vietnamese (Da Nang Publishing House.
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François Jullien,
une aventure qui a dérangé la philosophie
F RANÇOIS JULLIEN, AN ADVENTURE THAT DISTURBED PHILOSOPHY
François L’Yvonnet
January 2020 – 234 pages
An essential guide to understanding this seminal contemporary philosopher who is translated throughout the world.
Any serious philosophical undertaking begins with taking a step back, with a decentring. This is the price one must pay in order to unlearn prefabricated thoughts, unilateral points of view, and open up to the originality that lays at the very heart of what we know. Delving into François Jullien’s writing – that combines philosophy, Hellenism and Sinology – allows us to experience a dissidence in thinking – one that jostles and reconfigures the boundaries of philosophy.
In François Jullien, une aventure qui a dérangé la philosophie, François L’Yvonnet proposes to map out this philosopher’s intellectual thought and the audacity of his approach. An approach that led Jullien to make a detour through China (unheard of in the academic world, at the time) and turn to an “outside” in order to better question concepts we have inherited from the worlds of Greece and Rome (i.e., our “inside”). Like Ariadne’s thread, this approach guides us through the constellation of Jullien’s favourite subjects: politics, aesthetics, morality, living, art, love… in other words, every layer of existence.
For those already familiar with Jullien’s body of work, this essay will offer the keys to a greater appreciation of his writing. For everyone else, it will be an excellent introduction.
• Philosophy professor and publisher François L’Yvonnet is the author of Homo Comicus ou l'intégrisme de la rigolade (2012) and L'Effet Baudrillard, l'élégance d'une pensée (2013). He edited the special Cahier de l’Herne devoted to François Jullien (2018).
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La Résistance au nihilisme
Contre-histroire de la philosophie, vol. 12
RESISITING NIHILISM COUNTER-HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, VOL. 12
Michel Onfray
May 2020 – 528 pages
In the twelfth and last volume of the Contre-histroire de la philosophie Michel Onfray addresses the phenomenon of “post May 1968”. Though the spring of 1968 failed to produce the political revolution, it certainly did give rise to the metaphysical one. Libertarian, it put to an end the world built on hierarchy.
From the metaphysical point of view, May of 1968 spelled the end of the monotheistic Christian patriarchy. However, the new post-Christian values haven’t emerged to replace the overthrown Judeo-Christian ethics. The abolition of the reign of the superior over the inferior has led to an upheaval of the established values in such a manner that the inferior now governs over the superior. Formerly the capitalist had the power over the workers, the teachers – over the students, the parents – over the children. After May 1968, it’s the opposite. The Post May 1968 world is ruled by the nihilism.
After a long introduction on the construction of the nihilism, Michel Onfray examines the principal movements of after-May 1968: the spirit of the Vincennes, less libertarian than nihilist; the structuralism that reinterprets the Platonian idealism in the post-modern tones, or the Nouveaux Philosophes with Bertrand-Henri Levy, one of the main actors on the cultural and media scenes of the late 20th century. For Onfray, all of them are digging the grave of critical thinking and catalyze the emergence of the liberal left, that will mark the death of the left. New philosophical movements appear in response to this destructive nihilism. Michel Onfray distincts three principal figures: Vladimir Jankélévitch, Mikel Dufrenne (for his “joyful affirmation”), and Robert Misrahi (and his “acts of joy”). Thanks to those last two the thought of the end of the 20th century exceeds the nihilism and reinstalls happiness at the center of the philosophical quest.
With Resisting nihilism Michel Onfray closes this extraordinary project: to write the “counter-history” of the Western philosophy. Moving along the centerlines of the official, predominant philosophy he allows us to see the counter-philosophy, embracing all fields: metaphysical, political, aesthetical, phenomenological, poetical and social.
• Philosopher and essayist Michel Onfray published numerous works, that include La Sculpture de soi (Prix Médicis essai 1993), Traité d’athéologie (2005) and Le Crépuscule d’une idole (2010).
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Botaniste
Marc Jeanson et Charlotte Fauve
April 2019 – 224 pages
In an age when nature is being abused and forests are burning, Botaniste offers a fascinating tour of the world’s largest herbarium and a sensible exploration of the bonds between plants and human beings. The head of the Herbier National, Marc Jeanson, is a passionate scientist with plenty to say about the world, science, the great botanists, and the many journeys and adventures associated with the art of botany. He also recounts how plants have been ‘invented’, since every age forms its own specific image of nature. It is a fine homage to the natural world and a plea for us to reconnect with our living planet, which remains splendid despite the damage inflicted on it.
Tucked away in a rather austere building at the far end of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris is the largest herbarium in the world. It is full of secrets and wonders: eight million preserved plant specimens, the fruit of 350 years of gathering and pressing driven by the sheer passion of explorers and conquerors of new lands, who boldly ventured forth into the vast expanses of a natural world that was then so rich and so little understood.
Being a botanist is being in the field amid the mud and the unknown: many have given their names to plants, discovered and classified them, and elevated to the status of a science the joys of wandering through nature, sometimes at risk to their own lives. In this book, Marc Jeanson brings them to life and pays tribute to these inventors and researchers.
It reveals to us the working lives of its practitioners and the reality of the expeditions to places that many see as godforsaken where the few surviving palm trees are to be found by chance in hotel car parks. It describes as well how biodiversity is threatened with extinction, and emphasises the need to keep a record of all these species that evolve, disappear, or migrate.
Botaniste is a blend of science, individual characters and different eras with botany as the common thread, spanning the first stirrings of our awareness of the plant world to the present day. It is also a tale of adventures, voyages and shifting landscapes presented against a backdrop of science, heritage and history. Combining portraits, stories, forgotten episodes and shifts in scientific thinking, it is an unclassifiable and delightful book.
• Marc Jeanson is a botanist and agronomist. Having previously run the Herbier de Montpellier, since 2013 he has been in charge of France’s national herbarium at the Musée national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris. He acts as a scientific advisor to botanical associations in Normandy and was the curator of the ‘Gardens’ exhibition held at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2017.
• Charlotte Fauve is a landscape gardener, journalist and documentary filmmaker. She wrote the series ‘Etonnants jardins’ for the television channel Arte.
Rights sold: Chinese (East China Normal U.P.), German (Aufbau), Japanese (Typeshop_G), Italian (Garzanti). Under offer: Korean.
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Retour à Birkenau
B ACK TO BIRKENAU
Ginette Kolinka et Marion Ruggieri
May 2019 – 112 pages
LONGLISTED FOR THE PRIX ANDRÉ MALRAUX 2019
In strong and simple language, Ginette Kolinka delivers a poignant account, echoing Et tu n’es pas revenu by Marceline Loridan-Ivens, about her deportation to Auschwitz- Birkenau.
Arrested by the Gestapo in Avignon in March 1944 along with her father, her 12-year-old brother and her nephew, Ginette Kolinka was deported to Auschwitz-Bierkenau. She was the only one of them to come back, after passing through Bergen-Belsen, Raguhn and Theresienstadt. In that same convoy of spring 1944 were two other young women who would go on to become her friends: Simone Veil and Marceline Rozenberg (later Loridan-Ivens).
Now it is Ginette Kolinka’s turn to recount what she saw, what she lived through and what she survived in the extermination camps. The blows, the hunger, the cold, the hatred, the naked bodies, the cruelty, but sometimes also the fraternity. The dress that Simone Veil gave her and that saved her. Her aim is not to provide an exhaustive account of Birkenau, but to tell us enough so that we will never forget and will never cease to believe that it really happened. Now aged 94, even Ginette Kolinka closes her eyes and wonders again and again how on earth she could have survived all that…
• Born in Paris in 1925, Ginette Kolinka has always lived in the same building in the 11th arrondissement of the city. After the war, she resumed her life as a market trader while visiting schools on a daily basis to recount her experiences to the youth.
• Marion Ruggieri is a journalist and writer.
Rights sold: Czech (No Limits), Dutch (Arbeiderspers), German (Aufbau), Italian (Ponte Alle Grazie), Romanian (under offer), World Spanish (Seix Barral)
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Le Naufrage des civilisations
THE SHIPWRECK OF CIVILISATIONS
Amin Maalouf
March 2019 – 336 pages
PRIX AUJOURD’HUI 2019
Amin Maalouf, a leading expert on both the West and the East, is eminently worth listening to. His intuitions turn out to be accurate predictions, as demonstrates the prescience he has of the great secrets before they work their way into the universal consciousness. Twenty years ago he was expressing his concern at the rise of Murderous Identities, and ten years ago at the Deregulation of the World. Today he is convinced that we are on the threshold of a global shipwreck whose impact will be felt in every sphere of civilisation. Le Naufrage des civilisations, born out of a passion for world affairs and a sense of anxiety that has grown over the years, is a cry of alarm but not a manifesto. His intellectual arguments and analyses are fascinating, and this book could very well become a classic.
Although it remains the only superpower, America is in the process of losing all moral credibility. Europe, which offered its people and the rest of humanity the most ambitious and reassuring project of our time, is in the process of breaking up. The Arab/Muslim world is embroiled in a profound crisis that has plunged its people into despair and is having calamitous repercussions for the whole planet.
Major ‘emerging’ or ‘renascent’ nations such as China, India and Russia are taking a stand on the world stage in a toxic climate where self-interest and the law of the strongest reign. A new arms race seems inevitable. Moreover, there are serious threats (climate, environment, health) hanging over the planet and with which we will be unable to deal without the global solidarity that is so sorely lacking.
For over half a century, the author has been travelling the world and observing it. He was in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War and in Teheran when the Islamic Republic was ushered in. In this rich and powerful book, he is both an engaged spectator and a thinker, blending stories and reflections. Sometimes he relates major events to which he happened to be one of the rare eye witnesses, and then he adopts the detached bird’s-eye view of the historian to explain to us how humankind has repeatedly drifted and now finds itself on the verge of a shipwreck.
• Amin Maalouf has published many novels and essays, including the major critical and commercial successes Origines, Le Dérèglement du monde, Un fauteuil sur la Seine, and Les Désorientés. His works have been widely translated all around the world.
Rights sold: Italian (La Nave di Teseo), Spanish (Alianza), Turkish (Yapi Kredi), Dutch (World Editions), Greek (Enalios), Romanian (Polirom), Serbian (Laguna), Arabic (Dar Al Farabi), Portuguese (Portugal: Presenca, Brazil: Autentica).
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L’Élimination
THE ELIMINATION
Rithy Panh et Christophe Bataille
January 2012 — 320 pages
GRAND PRIX DES LECTRICES DE ELLE 2013 PRIX JOSEPH-KESSEL 2012 PRIX AUJOURD’HUI 2012 PRIX ESSAI FRANCE TELEVISIONS 2012
L’Élimination is the fascinating autobiography of the director, Rithy Panh, who survived the Khmer Rouge camps. With this very personal story, he conveys the horror, attempts to understand the mechanisms of evil and, as in his films, explores the painful history of his country, Cambodia.
L’Élimination plunges into the origins of the Cambodian genocide. Rithy Panh leads a real fight against Duch, the executioner who headed the S21 Center from 1975 to 1979, in the heart of Phnom Penh - emptied of its inhabitants by the Khmer Rouge. There, 12,380 people, horrifically tortured for days and weeks, confessed to fictitious betrayals, before being executed.
Already in his film S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, Rithy Panh imagined the meeting of the executioners and survivors of this center, and he filmed Duch in his Criminal Court prison. Here again, in L’Élimination, he attempts to capture the persona of the organizer of these executions. He wants to understand this man, his personal journey, his ideology, and his methods. He evokes the recruitment of his squads, but also his passion for numbers, his "seminars" of torture, and his ties to Pol Pot.
Neither demon nor ordinary person, Duch is a complex and cultivated man. Confronting him, Rithy Panh tells of his own anguish and artistic choices, but also his childhood: he was ten in 1975. He lost his parents and most of his brothers and sisters under the Khmer Rouge regime. He survived. He wants to understand.
• Born in Cambodia in 1965, Rithy Panh is a filmmaker. His work has been praised throughout the world, from S21 – The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine to L’image manquante (The Missing Picture – Prix Un Certain Regard, Cannes 2013), and more recently Les tombeaux sans noms (Graves Without a Name). Christophe Bataille is a writer and editor.
Rights sold: Chinese (Shangai 99), English (US: Other Press), German (Hoffmann und Campe), Italian (Feltrinelli), Japanese (Gendai Shicho-Sha), Romanian (Corint), Spanish (Anagrama), Ukrainian (Ecem Media).
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