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True stories: discovery / historical / scientificAugust 2020The Tailor of Relizane
by Olivia Elkaim
“Algeria, 1958: my grandfather was Jewish and a tailor by trade. He had to give up everything.” When someone knocks at Marcel’s door in the middle of the night, he fears for his life and those of his wife and children. A bag is pulled over his head, he is bundled into a truck and driven into the desert. Will he be killed or released? Three days later, he returns to Relizane safe and sound. His family wonder what his safe return means. What forfeit has he paid and who to? His wife Viviane, his brothers, mother and neighbours all question him. But he says nothing. When a young Arab apprentice turns up outside his shop, Marcel realises that sooner or later he will have to leave his country. But even in France, where he makes a new life for himself, he never gives up the wild hope of returning to his shop in Relizane…
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August 2020The Society of Fine Folks
by Tobie Nathan
A saga set between Cairo and post WWII Paris, imbued with magic realism. Born into poverty in a destitute Jewish quarter of old Cairo, Zohar arrives in France with no family, no friends and no money. His only companion is the ghost of Dieter Boehm, his Nazi torturer. He leaves behind a war-torn Egypt: a land as unhealthy as its king, Faruk, who is softened by a life of luxury; a country poisoned by the rise of the Muslim Brother, by former Nazis infiltrating its army, pogroms against the Jews and the rebellion lead by the powerful Nasser.Once in France, he shares his obsessions with Aaron, Lucien and Paulette, three people bound by their determination to break with an oppressive past. They treat their former tormentors to the same procedure: two bullets to the head, the first for revenge, the other as a signature.This is the story that Zohar’s son François uncovers. It will help him understand the mysterious promise his father made to the “Society of Fine Folks” – a promise François decides to honour.
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FictionAugust 2020The Great Ordeal
by Etienne de Montety
An ordinary couple, Laure and François Berteau. Their adopted son, David, a cheerful teenager who wonders about his origins. Father Georges Tellier, a priest with an unyielding fate in a context of clerical decline. Frédéric Nguyen, a cop resolved to action and silence, in order to preserve his private life. Hicham, a reckless show-off who ends up in prison. Hurtful comments, unlucky encounters. A growing influence of Islamism and an ever more radical rage. And everything unravels. Towards this little village church in the southwest of France, tragedy attracts, like an explosive magnet, men who were initially worlds apart
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Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)August 2020Sabre
by Emmanuel Ruben
Once upon a time there was a sabre… When his grandfather dies, Samuel Livdweiss returns to his grandparents’ house. Everything seems normal but the sabre that had pride of place in the dining room has disappeared. Samuel decides to investigate this childhood memory with the help of his aunt Esther, a retired bookseller. It’s not so much the sabre with its curved blade itself that fascinates him, but the history it saw, the succession of men and wars. Which ancestor did it date back to? Who was the heroic – or, perhaps lawless – impostor VLRL (Victor Livdweiss Rex Livorum) who once ruled over a Baltic archipelago? A family myth endlessly reinvented by ageing uncles. A picaresque novel with shades of Raspe’s The Adventures of Baron Münchhausen and Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees. It is a giddying quest that takes us right back to the Napoleonic wars and invites us on an outlandish journey in pursuit of pipedreams.
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Biography & True StoriesFebruary 2020In Siberia's Prisons
by Yoann Barbereau
Midnight Express in Siberia. A gripping contemporary story of escape. “The scene unfolds not far from Lake Baikal, where I live and love and am lucky enough to be loved, in Irkutsk, the capital of eastern Siberia. It’s morning, men in balaclavas appear out of nowhere. My daughter screams. She’s five years old. I’m arrested right in front of her, then beaten – expertly – and interrogated. Worst of all I’m branded with that ignominious word I struggle to commit to paper: paedophile. These men hidden behind balaclavas and shadows want my skin. They have set in motion an implacable and brutish process of destruction that has a name, a name I know, invented by the KGB: Kompromat.” Inside Siberia’s prisons, I try to understand. In the psychiatric hospital where I’m later interned, I try to understand. I’m guaranteed fifteen years of a gruelling camp. The story of my escapes can begin.
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Biography: arts & entertainmentJanuary 2021The One and Only
Maria Casarès
by Anne Plantagenet
The little-known story of Maria Casarès, a Spanish exile in France, actress, free spirit and Albert Camus’s lover. With her monstrous appetite, raucous laugh and scorching sensuality, Maria Casarès was born and grew up in Galicia, fled Franco in 1936, and came to Paris at 14. She very soon wanted to learn the unforgiving French language, become an actress, express herself physically, dance, love… Nothing could stop her, not rejection from the Conservatoire, nor Paris etiquette. Her talent swiftly earned recognition, and she became one of the greatest tragedians of the second half of the Twentieth Century. She was also Albert Camus’ “One and only”. They had a sixteen-year relationship, a tormented love kept in the shadows, but it flourished through a fascinating correspondence.
