While bookstores have been closed for almost four months in all, Europe 1 offers you a selection of six novels published in 2020. Something to distract you during and after the holiday season.
Bookstores have remained closed for nearly four months this year, due to the coronavirus pandemic.
So, even if you stayed connected with express deliveries and "click and collect", you may have missed a few new things.
A dive into Marseille in the 1990s, a hit and run in California, social gatherings alongside Andy Warhol and Truman Capote… To catch up with you, Europe 1 has selected six very good novels published in 2020, to be placed under the tree or to savor on the sofa.
There are men who will always get lost
, by Rebecca Lighieri
The novel opens with a bitter observation: "The life expectancy of love is eight years. For hatred, count rather twenty. The only thing that lasts always is childhood, when it went wrong. "
Karel lives in a city in the northern districts of Marseille.
He grew up as best he could between two drug addicted parents, alongside his sister Hendricka and Mohand, their crippled little brother, brooded by their mother and rejected by their father.
Rebecca Lighieri (the alias of Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam) tells the story of the rugged adolescence of a young man haunted by a family story both tragic and shabby, of which he is afraid to be the heir.
The novel is punctuated by the voices of IAM, Michael Jackson, Richard Cocciante and Céline Dion, which resonate there like so many bursts of vitality.
> With POL editions, 21 euros.
Demons
, by Simon Liberati
It is a novel between fiction and reality, where the imagined characters cross paths with Louis Aragon, Pierre Lazareff and Brigitte Bardot.
In the mid-1960s, Serge, Taïné and Alexis were three rich and nonchalant brothers and sisters.
When the first died, the second left for New York where she surrounded herself with Andy Warhol and Truman Capote.
She leads a whimsical, often decadent existence, between Paris, Cannes and Bangkok.
Both character and inspiration, Truman Capote is everywhere in Liberati's latest book.
It is in line with the unfinished
Prayers answered
, the story of a failed writer who lives on his charms and his black humor in good society.
Les Démons
is the first volume of an announced trilogy, a vast fresco of an era combining darkness and brilliance.
> From Stock editions, 20.90 euros.
The other Americans
, by Laila Lalami
One spring evening, after leaving the
diner
he owns, Driss Guerraoui, an American of Moroccan origin, is hit by a car.
He dies instantly while the driver takes flight.
Very quickly, a terrible question emerges: was this death a tragic traffic accident or a racist crime?
Nora, Driss's daughter, demands justice.
Against a background of a police investigation, this fascinating novel with several voices explores the history of the Guerraoui family, from Casablanca in the 1980s to today's California.
Finalist for the very prestigious National Book Award, this novel propelled Laila Lalami, professor at the University of California, to the forefront of the American literary scene.
> From Christian Bourgeois editions, 22.50 euros.
She lied for the wings
, by Francesca Serra
Garance, 15, leads an ordinary teenage life in the south of France.
Permanently connected to social networks, she is fascinated by the little kings of the school, two years older.
To be, she is ready for anything.
But one fine morning, Garance disappears.
His mother, the school, the police, everyone is looking for him.
Francesca Serra keeps a breathtaking suspense, sketching over the pages a plot much more complex than it seems.
Combining teenage jealousies, early experiences and online harassment, the novel alternates classic narrative and group conversations punctuated by emojis.
Alternately serious and comical, the novelist skillfully handles changes of voice and backtracking.
She lied for the wings
, the first work of the Corsican writer, was awarded the literary prize of the
World
.
> Editions Anne Carrière, 21 euros.
Betty,
by Tiffany McDaniel
It is a novel inspired by a true story, that of his mother.
In
Betty
, American novelist Tiffany McDaniel tells the fate of a young Métis girl of Cherokee origin.
This story punctuated with heavy family secrets and Native American myths delivers the intimate story of modest inhabitants of an imaginary village in southern Ohio, at the foot of the Appalachians.
"Not only did dad need his stories to be believed, but we needed to believe them too. We were clinging like madmen to the hope that life was not limited to the simple reality around us" , says the narrator.
Awarded the Fnac Prize in the fall, this novel explores the power of words and the imagination, remedial counterweights to violence, rejection and sexual abuse.
> From Gallmeister editions, 26.40 euros.
Black Manoo
, by Gauz
It's a trip between Belleville and Abidjan.
In the 1990s, Black Manoo arrived in Paris in search of a fellow musician.
Without papers, he lives in the northeast of the capital, maybe drunk, maybe crazy.
In the bars of the 20th arrondissement, he makes a series of “murderous rum-ginger”, becomes friends with the figures of the neighborhood, shares memories clouded by drugs, tells stories of love and stays in prison.
In this touching novel, with a disjointed chronology, Gauz explores a popular Paris and neighborhoods not yet gentrified.
The Ivorian writer, Parisian by adoption, became known in 2014 with
Debout-Payé
, a social satire on the setbacks of a young undocumented student who became a vigilante in a supermarket.
> From Le nouvelle Attila editions, 18 euros.