The literary season has just started. Over the next few weeks, more than 500 new products competing for the autumn prices (Goncourt, Femina, Médicis, etc.) will take place in bookstores.
Readers can immerse themselves since this Wednesday in First blood by Amélie Nothomb, published by Albin Michel. The Belgian author signs the fictitious memoirs of her father who died last year. Where we discover an eccentric family, and rediscover a tragic episode in the history of the former Zaire by this Belgian diplomat. In the spring of the monsters, dissection by Philippe Jaenada of a news item from the 1960s, the Lucien Léger affair, also came out this Wednesday, published by Mialet-Barrault.
These two pitches set the tone for this literary re-entry, many of whose novels deal with the weight of history and the wounds it engenders.
Wars and the Holocaust
Sorj Chalandon with Bastard child (Grasset), Marc Dugain with Willingness (Gallimard), François Noudelmann with The Children of Cadillac (Gallimard) have in common to evoke their ancestry in the midst of the dramas and wars of the twentieth century.
Holocaust haunts other authors: Anne Berest delves into Jewish roots after receiving Postcard (Grasset) while Gisèle Berkman describes a survivor in Mrs (Arléa). Anti-Semitism before the First World War is the subject of Christophe Donner’s fresco, France goy (Grasset), while Jean-Christophe Grangé evokes assassinations in Berlin high society at the end of the 1930s in The Promises (Albin Michel, released on September 9).
The torments of Africa and slavery point in Mamba Point blues (Presses de la Cité) by Christophe Naigeon, who travels between New York, France and Liberia, or in The Gate of the No Return Journey (Threshold) by David Diop, novelist recently awarded the International Booker Prize, who signs a fictionalized version of the adventures of a French naturalist in Senegal in the 18th century. Of blues it is also question in Delta blues (Grasset) by Julien Delmaire, who tells the story of the birth of this music in the Mississippi Delta.
Closer to us in time, Michaël Prazan draws the portrait of a former Japanese Red Army officer with Memories of the Shore of the Dead (Rivages), and Julie Ruocco explores Syrian Kurdistan and its surroundings, ravaged by the conflict of the past ten years, in Furies (Actes Sud).