Francophone literature

Sarah's Key

by Tatiana de Rosnay

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's...

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

by Muriel Barbery & Alison Anderson

Renee is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building, home to members of the great and the good. Over the years she has maintained her carefully constructed persona as someone reliable but totally uncultivated,...

Nausea

by Jean-Paul Sartre, Richard Howard & James Wood

Sartre's greatest novel — and existentialism's key text — now introduced by James Wood.

Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic,...

Suite Francaise

by Irene Nemirovsky

Beginning in Paris on the eve of the Nazi occupation in 1940. Suite Française tells the remarkable story of men and women thrown together in circumstances beyond their control. As Parisians flee the city, human...

The First Man

by Albert Camus

Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed...

The Stranger

by Albert Camus

Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd." First published in 1946; now in...

Eldorado

by Laurent Gaudé

A moving fable about luck, persistence, and hope, grounded in the often tragic reality of modern-day immigration, by the winner of the 2004 Prix Goncort.Captain Salvatore Piracci has sailed along the Italian...

Empress

by Shan Sa

Such is the voice of Shan Sa's unforgettable heroine in her latest literary masterpiece, Empress. Empress Wu, one of China's most controversial figures, was its first and only female emperor, who emerged in...

The Wine of Solitude

by Irene Nemirovsky & Sandra Smith

Introspective and poignant, The Wine of Solitude is the most autobiographical of all of the novels from the celebrated author of Suite Française.

Beginning in a fictionalized Kiev, The Wine of Solitude follows...

The Immoralist

by André Gide

First published in 1902 and immediately assailed for its themes of omnisexual abandon and perverse aestheticism, The Immoralist is the novel that launced André Gide's reputation as one of France's most audacious...

All Our Wordly Goods

by Irene Nemirovsky

In haunting ways, this gorgeous novel prefigures Irène Némirovsky’s masterpieceSuite Française. Set in France between 1910 and 1940 and first published in France in 1947, five years after the author’s...

Jezebel

by Irene Nemirovsky

A stunning novel about mothers and daughters, about vengeance, and an aging, still beautiful woman on trial for shooting her lover.

In a French courtroom, the trial of a woman is taking place. Gladys Eysenach...

The Horseman on the Roof

by Jean Giono & Jonathan Griffin

Perhaps no other of his novels better reveals Giono's perfect balance between lyricism and narrative, description and characterization, the epic and the particular, than The Horseman on the Roof. This novel,...

In the Gold of Time

by Claudie Gallay

Set between Normandy and Arizona, In the Gold of Time is a seductive tale of silences and dark, half-revealed secrets, and a haunting elegy for innocence lost in a lost world.

A young father holidays by the sea...

Irene: The Commandant Camille Verhoeven Trilogy

by Pierre Lemaitre & Frank Wynne

Pierre Lemaitre is known for writing crime fiction with an alchemical mix of white-knuckle intensity, fearlessly unconventional plotting, and psychologically intricate character development. In Irene Lemaitre...

The Grand Banks Caf

by Georges Simenon & David Coward

A new translation of Georges Simenon's gripping novel set in an insular fishing community, book eight in the new Penguin Maigret series. It was indeed a photograph, a picture of a woman. But the face was completely...

A Crime in Holland

by Georges Simenon & Sian Reynolds

A new translation of Georges Simenon's novel set in a tranquil town on the dutch coast, book seven in the new Penguin Maigret series. 'Just take a look,' Duclos said in an undertone, pointing to the scene all...

The Strange Death of Sullivan Chance

by Thierry Maugenest, David Beardsmore & Diane Johnson

Sullivan Chance is plucked from the rustic obscurity of the American Southwest and thrust by a scheming producer into the spotlight of a new a “reality” show in which a penniless Sullivan has to travel around...

Limonov: The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia

by Emmanuel Carrere & John Lambert

A thrilling page-turner that also happens to be the biography of one of Russia's most controversial figures

This is how Emmanuel Carrère, the magnetic journalist, novelist, filmmaker, and chameleon, describes...

The Goddess of Small Victories

by Yannick Grannec

An internationally best-selling debut novel about the life, marriage, and legacy of one of the greatest mathematicians of the last century 

Princeton University 1980. Kurt Gödel, the most fascinating, though...