DECRYPTION
What face will the literary return of 2020 have? The coronavirus health crisis and the confinement upset the publications of March and April, with new questions from publishers: what to do with the authors who were due out in the spring? Will the calendar of outings in August and September be congested? Europe 1 looked at this key moment for publishing professionals, upset this year.
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For the past few years, the trend for the new school year has been to offer fewer books for the new year. Publishers were playing the game, but the 2020 literary season forced them to rewrite spring novels. Some are pushed back to the end of October or November, or even to the spring of 2021. But others are finally encrusted in the literary season of August and September.
The first novels sacrificed?
Some publishers have given up on early novels to make way for heavyweights. "At Lattès editions, we decided not to change our programming for the start of the literary season," explains Véronique Cardi, who runs the Parisian house. "Above all, we decided not to suppress the programming of our first novels because we felt that the start of the literary season is a great moment for readers' appetite for new voices.
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For the rest, there is no significant change. Except for a second wave of coronavirus in the weeks or months to come, the start of the literary season promises to be good, with some very beautiful novels to come. And the booksellers, they raise their heads since the confinement by breaking sales records.
Three favorites
Among the novels identified by Europe 1 is Heritage , the third novel by Miguel Bonnefoy (Rivages editions) after Le Journal d'Octavio and Sucre noir . The spiritual son of Gabriel Garcia Marquez delivers a fresco over 100 years with a Frenchman from Jura who leaves with a vine in to exile in California. He was arrested before in Chile and set up a sort of dynasty there, all in 195 pages.
We should also mention the American Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize for Underground Railroad , who was once again awarded this prize for Nickel Boys , the story of a prison for children in Florida. An investigation was also opened due to the abuse of children. The novel tells the story of a young black man promised a bright future but victim of a miscarriage of justice and placed in this reformatory. Finally, on the heavyweight side, Amélie Nothomb publishes Les Aérostats , the story of a 19-year-old girl who seeks to make some money by giving letter lessons, in particular to a dyslexic boy who is a fan of aerostats.