• Tweeter

  • republish

French bookstores make a third of their annual turnover during the September academic year. (illustration image) AFP / Damien Meyer

A total of 524 novels, including 336 French and 188 foreigners are expected in bookstores by the end of October. For two weeks, the frenzy is the same in all the bookstores in France that make during the academic year of September a third of their annual turnover. A typically French phenomenon, this is the tightest comeback in 20 years, a sign of the fragility of the publishing world.

Between the expected authors whose reputation is second to none, the successful novelists who make the trade and the newcomers to discover among the 82 first novels of this season, how to navigate?

Amelie Nothomb , one of the indestructible, has been writing a novel every fall since 1998 and one of the biggest draws of the autumn. With Soif (with Albin Michel), she gives the floor to Jesus who tells his last hours.

At Grasset, several authors have already entered the list of best sellers. Laurent Binet changes history and imagines with Civilization a Europe invaded by the Incas in the sixteenth century. While Sorj Chalandon signs a fiction about a discreet woman suffering from cancer, who discovers the urgency to live and the insubordination in a fierce joy . Leonora Miano makes Africa shine in Red Empress , a flamboyant novel in a futuristic Africa.

The discreet Jean-Paul Dubois, whom his faithful readers had been waiting for three years, publishes All men do not live the world the same way to the editions of the Olivier. It will however wait until October 3 to read Encre sympathique (Gallimard), the latest vintage of the Nobel Prize for literature Patrick Modiano.

As for foreign novels, Anglo-Saxons and Nordics are very well represented. Actes Sud publishes the American novelist Siri Hustvedt with Souvenirs of the future while her compatriot, the prolific Joyce Carol Oates, offers us A book of American martyrs at Philippe Rey.

And among the most anticipated novelists, Britain's Jonathan Coe signs The Heart of England , a scathing chronicle of English society in the 2010s, " the great novel of Brexit " provide the critics.

► To read also: 2019 Literary entry: the essential of African production