3 Must-Reads from Back-to-School (and Bookstore!) Season

NEWS | October 26, 2020

3 livres à retenir de la rentrée littéraire

With this year's back-to-school season also comes a host of new novels and publications, 511 to be exact, from authors French and foreign. From this vast collection of new works, Printemps.com has selected three favorites.

L'Enfant céleste ("Celestial child"), by Maud Simonnot (Les Éditions de l'Observatoire)

Editor and member of Gallimard's reading committee, Maud Simonnot leads us through a liminal world, at once untamed and otherworldly: that of the legendary island of Ven, in the Baltic Sea, where during the Renaissance the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe dreamed of an observatory in which to draw a map of the sky. This is the setting that our heroine, Mary, also chooses as a refuge for her son, Célian, after a lover's quarrel. Thus, begins a new life in contact with nature, which this novel celebrates through a style both delicate and poetic.

Fille ("Girl"), by Camille Laurens (Gallimard)

Camille Laurens releases a bracing, poignant novel that takes us through (partially autobiographical) time. Laurence Barraqué, born in Rouen in 1959, is confronted with gender inequality from her very earliest age. These injustices translate through language and other elements in the education she receives. From the playground to the inner workings of the family, the narrator weaves personal experiences into larger changes in French society over the last four decades. Laurence gives birth to a girl, to whom she pledges to transmit emancipatory values in defiance of those who tried to rob her of them. A feminist novel reminiscent of de Beauvoir, critically acclaimed upon release.

L'Arrachée belle, by Lou Darsan (La Contre Allée)

This debut novel follows a woman who realizes that her daily life and her husband are suffocating her and decides to set off into the wild, alone. A leap into the unknown through which she remembers the glimmer of resilience and the will to live, all in daring to challenge conventions that don't suit her. The heroine's name is never revealed: "What I wanted was for my protagonist, this woman who leaves everything that defines her identity, to no longer be able to be defined by anything but herself and what she feels," Lou Darsan explained on France Culture's "Reveil Culturel", after also having adopted a nomadic form of life for three years. "It's a way of stripping everything bare."