France: a “worried” literary return to the book, but with star authors

Shelving for a literary comeback in a bookstore in Brest, in the west of France.

AFP - FRED TANNEAU

Text by: RFI Follow

1 min

It's the traditional literary season in France: 490 new novels will be published by mid-October.

The figure is lower than usual, 30 less than last year, and 150 less than ten years ago.

But with many sure values, that is to say authors who should boost sales.

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After the two years of Covid where the confinements suffered had put the French back to reading, the time is again for concern.

The literary re-entry is worrying.

This year, in the first half of the year, sales were bad, this is always the case in a presidential year.

But above all, the attack on Ukraine by Russia on February 24 emptied bookstores.

The return of inflation has also darkened the horizon.

The 490 titles that will be released are overwhelmingly the work of French-speaking writers, 145 are translated foreign authors and 90 are first novels.

This shows that despite the difficulties, the desire for discovery remains strong among publishers.

The most powerful compete for the stars who pull the sales.

Despentes, Nothomb, Musso and the others

Grasset publishes Virginie Despentes and her

which benefits from a "steamroller" release, the other headliners are Amélie Nothomb, who publishes her 31st novel with Albin Michel,

, or Guillaume Musso with

in Calmann-Lévy.

In general, it is the great return of the intimate in the story.

The question of gender is recurrent, as is the eternal theme of the family.

Behind this literary return, it is the race for autumn literary awards that is being played out with the end-of-year sales in prospect.

A new book is easily worth twenty euros in France and the price remains stable despite a record rise in the cost of paper.

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