The holidays are coming and you may have planned to take a trip to the bookstore before you go.
Thrillers, learning novels, travelogues, political fiction or biography… Europe 1 recommends 11 books to slip into your suitcase.
On the beach, at the foot of a tree, on the train or in a hammock… what better than a good book to savor your summer vacation?
Live the adventures of a good English family, meet a Hollywood legend, unravel the mysteries of Detroit or set off to conquer a desert island: Europe 1 recommends eleven very good fictions and biographies released in recent months in bookstores, to slide in your suitcase before you leave.
Before summer
, by Claudie Gallay
From her bedroom window, 23-year-old Jessica watches people go by. She had left her native town for Lyon, but her first love left her unceremoniously so she returned to her parents. With her four lifelong friends, she hangs out in the village square, in the café or at a table in the Social House. To leave, to stay, to settle down, to flutter, to have a child, to abort. Claudie Gallay, author in 2008 of the fascinating
Les déferlantes
, tells the story of the coming of age of five young women in the mid-1980s, between the comfort of routine and the desire for adventure.
At the beginning of the book, the five friends decide to present a fashion show at the spring party.
They stitch, sew, put on thigh boots, tuxedos and wigs.
Friendly rivalries, love stories and class struggle are woven around their show.
A sweet learning novel.
> Actes Sud, 22 euros.
Where We Danced
, by Judith Perrignon
2013. Ira, a Detroit police officer, contemplates the remains of the Brewster Douglass Project, a social housing district built in the 1930s for the African-American population, a promise of modernity that has fallen into disrepair. The body of an unidentified young man has just been discovered there. Much more than just a police investigation,
where we used to dance
is a novel punctuated by real events that traces the history of a city, once the industrial glory of America, which in the 2010s became a symbol of economic violence and racial struggles.
Judith Perrignon crosses the ages - 1935, the 1960s, today - and the voices - of police officers, residents of the Brewsters Douglass Project, young people and elders - to retrace step by step the fate of a jealous, abandoned city, now gentrified.
The novel is punctuated by the music of the many musicians from Detroit that we meet over the pages, such as Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye.
> Shores, 20 euros.
La Saga des Cazalet
, by Elisabeth Jane Howard
Published in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s,
La Saga des Cazalet
made the glory of its author and joined the select club of books adapted by the BBC. But it took more than 30 years for the saga to appear in France, on the eve of the first confinement. Its dazzling success surprised even its French publisher. Because despite the closure of bookstores, readers in France have
flocked to English Summer
, the first volume - out of five - in a series with old-fashioned charm, more modern than Jane Austen and even more captivating than
Dowtown Abbey.
.
Set in the 1930s, the saga tells the story of the successes and misfortunes of the Cazalet, an English family if there is one, whose characters are much more complex than they appear.
Elisabeth Jane Howard navigates with impressive fluidity between the fifteen characters who share the narration.
Two volumes remain to be published and we are already afraid to close the last one.
> Editions of the round table, 23 to 24 euros per volume.
Reality TV
, by Aurélien Bellanger
"The culmination of half a century of television, the absolute studio. (…) The world was made to succeed." Just 20 years ago, the first season of
Loft Story
, inspired by the Dutch show
Big Brother
, was broadcast in France. Behind closed doors, nervous breakdowns, swimming pool and ubiquitous cameras: the concept, which can be used endlessly, quickly became one of the pillars of the PAF. In his latest novel, Aurélien Bellanger paints the portrait of Sébastien Bitereau, son of a Drôme plumber with flawless ambition, who looks like Stéphane Courbit, former boss of Endemol and creator of
Loft Story.
.
From his discovery behind the scenes of an industry as fascinating as it is cynical to his cathodic reign, the author plays with clichés and does not hesitate to stage the great figures of French television.
> Gallimard, 19 euros.
Laziness for all
, by Hadrien Klent
The French should only work 15 hours a week.
This is what Emilien Long, Nobel laureate in economics and candidate for the 2022 presidential election, proposes. He outlines his program at the beginning of the book in
Le droit à la laesse au XXIème siècle,
where he imagines a country that reverses its priorities to give citizens time to do what they want.
First presented by politicians as a completely crazy iconoclast, Emilien Long ends up threatening the candidates of the traditional parties.
While unrolling a well-crafted economic and political argument, Hadrien Klent (a pseudonym) signs a pleasing fiction, which traces a year and a half of the electoral campaign.
When you close the book, you start to dream: and we, what would we do if we only worked three hours a day?
> Tripod, 19 euros.
Billy Wilder and I
, by Jonathan Coe
The story begins in London, continues in Los Angeles, takes a breath in Greece before making a detour through Munich and Paris. Callista, in her fifties, remembers the summer of 1977, when she left her native Greece to cross the United States. In Los Angeles, she meets the great Billy Wilder, Hollywood legend all that there is more real, to whom we owe in particular
Insurance on death
and
Some like it hot
. A few months later, she joined him in Greece on the set of his penultimate film,
Fedora.
.
While she discovers in amazement behind the scenes of the seventh art, the filmmaker, for his part, saw this filming as his swan song.
In the middle of the story, Jonathan Coe inserts a long passage written in script form, in which Billy Wilder recounts his debut as a Jewish filmmaker leaving Nazi Germany for Paris.
Eras intersect, memories overlap.
> Gallimard, 22 euros.
The capital snake
, by Pierre Lemaître
Pierre Lemaître, 2013 Goncourt Prize for
Au revoir là-haut
, has just published… his first novel. This thriller written in 1985, which had never been published until now, is a nice surprise. He tells the story of Mathilde, a formidable hired killer in her quiet retired air. She receives her orders from a senior secret service officer, a former resistance comrade, via telephone booths that smack of pre-cellphone thriller.
Le Serpent majuscule
is a bloody noir novel with a handwriting tinged with humor. Pierre Lemaitre bids farewell to the genre that made him known more than ten years ago but that he decided to abandon. Its early readers just have to savor it.
> Albin Michel, 20.90 euros.
Olympia
, by Paul-Henry Bizon
September 2000, Sydney Olympic Games. After the first series of the 400m ladies, three letters appear on the giant screens facing the name of Marie-José Pérec: DNS, for "did not start". The three-time Olympic champion did not start and will no longer run until her official retirement in 2004. More than 20 years later, Paul-Henry Bizon was inspired by the immense Guadoulepéen athlete to write a utopian fiction , articulated around his flight. The story begins on the eve of the 2024 Olympic Games, when Roxanne, head of marketing for a large Swiss watchmaking group, decides to make Pérec his muse. Watching again the races of the idol of his childhood brings back buried memories. Her research leads her to Olympia,an abandoned stadium where a bunch of athletes try to build a world where athletes no longer live under pressure. A salutary novel at a time when their mental health was invited to the center of the debate.
> Gallimard, 18 euros.
Oasis or the revenge of the rednecks
, by Benjamin Durand and Nico Prat
Nothing predestined these two working class brothers from Manchester to conquer the world.
And yet, Noel and Liam Gallagher, the stormy brothers of the legendary band Oasis, became rock legends in the mid-1990s with their hits
Wonderwall
and
Don't Look Back In Anger
.
But more than their music, Benjamin Durand authors and Nico Prat interested in this "success story" very
british
from a historical and sociological point of view.
Or how these two "rednicks", with their sharp accent and their dirty kid ways, became standard bearers of the working class mistreated by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, before becoming symbols of a United Kingdom. conqueror again in the 1990s, in the wake of Tony Blair's "New Labor".
A fascinating book, teeming with details and anecdotes, that Oasis fans must read.
> Playlist Society, 14 euros.
Le chemin des estives
, by Charles Wright
"There was too much noise everywhere, too much talk. One day I got sick of this frenzy and left." A few years ago, Charles Wright, barely 40, had a sort of revelation, an epiphany: he wanted to become a Jesuit. He therefore begins his novitiate, which includes a walk of 700 kilometers. He chooses the Massif Central, where he hopes to escape the noise and the crowds. Without a penny in his pocket, he walks alone but still has to face the world, meet people, ask for room and board.
Le Chemin des estives
is a book in the form of a spiritual quest. More than a novel, this is a literary travelogue, under the high sponsorship of Rimbaud and Charles de Foucauld. This year he won the Europe 1-GMF literary prize.
> Flammarion, 21 euros.
Marcher à Kerguelen
, by François Garde
During twenty-five days, in the rain, the wind and the cold, François Garde and his three companions made the complete crossing of Kerguelen on foot and in total autonomy. The archipelago, nicknamed "the islands of desolation", is located in the very south of the Indian Ocean, some 3,250 kilometers from Reunion, the nearest inhabited land. Discovered in 1772 by French sailors, Kerguelen was never permanently populated, despite some attempts at colonization. Over the stages, in river crossings, along black sand beaches, during bivouacs or passing passes, the footsteps of the walkers resonate with the silence and the mystery of the island. Published by Gallimard in 2018 and awarded the Thomas-Allix prize from the Society of French Explorers, the book has just been published in pocket.
> Gallimard-Folio, 8.10 euros.