2025 literary season: our ten favourites!

All the novels in our selection explore origins, mostly foreign, but also describe what it means to be a foreigner in a country other than your own, a foreigner in your own country, or a foreigner to yourself.
 

1) Kolkhoze, by Emmanuel Carrère, POL publishing

The “book event” of the autumn, a favourite for the Prix Goncourt, praised by all critics. Kolkhoze is the new “true novel” of a family spanning four generations, covering more than a century of Russian and French history, up to the war in Ukraine.

Emmanuel Carrère tells this story by delving into the life of his late mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, an intellectual figure and the first woman to serve as the permanent secretary of the Académie Française, with “his expert art of narration that succeeds in making their story our story.” The reader delves through the Bolshevik Revolution, the European exile of the White Russians, two World Wars, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Putin’s Russia and its wars, while entering “a family saga at once wildly novelistic and tragic, marked by destinies both prestigious and modest, sometimes dark and tormented.” This sweeping literary painting intertwines family archives, intimate memory, and the great geopolitical upheavals of the twentieth century, told in a sober, introspective style. 

2) Nous n'avons rien à envier au reste du monde, by Nicolas Gaudemet, Editions de l’Observatoire publishing

A specialist of medias and artificial Intelligence, Nicolas Gaudemet takes us on a very different field. We are now in North Korea, where every move is watched and two teenagers discover love. 

Yoon Gi comes from an inferior class, while Mi Ran’s parents, elite members of the Party, already promised her to another student. However, a look exchanged during a public execution will turn their lives upside down. Under the omnipresent eye of the neighbourhood squads and State Security, “their clandestine passion becomes a silent resistance”. How to love each other in a dictatorship where the slightest deviation can take you to rehabilitation camp? How to dream of freedom when everything drives you to submission? “A moving novel, both an intimate story and a political depiction, where passion struggles to exist in the ordinary horror of a totalitarian regime”, a North Korean Romeo and Juliet that “questions the limits of bravery, rebellion and hope”.

3) Où s'adosse le ciel, by David Diop, Julliard publishing

The new novel by David Diop, the “Goncourt des lycéens” Prize winner in 2018 of Senegalese origin and French professor-researcher, takes us to the late 19th century, where Bilal Seck, the hero of the story, completes his pilgrimage to Mecca and is about to come back to Saint-Louis, Senegal.

A cholera epidemic is decimating the region, but Bilal recovers, before the incredulous eyes of a French doctor who tries to unveil the secrets of his immunity... Without any results, because Bilal is already elsewhere, “taken by another story, the one he never ceases to chant, an immense mythos, still intact, carried through the long chain of speaking which links him to his ancestors”. From Ancient Egypt to Senegal, a masterful novel about a man gone “to the reconquest of his origins and immemorial sources of his word”, a powerful novel, a quest for freedom.

4) Le corbeau qui m'aimait, by Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, Zulma publishing (translated novel)

A Sudanese writer, major voice of Arabic language, Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, who is censored in his own country and lives in exile between France and Austria, published this autumn a novel where you follow the journey of Sudanese migrants in Europe. 

They dream of reaching England, even if it takes a hot-air balloon to cross the Channel. This was the dream of Adam, one of the oldest residents of the “Calais Jungle”, who lived it all, from police brutality to the cruel mockeries of the inhabitants, and desperation and spleen. To pass the time, he talks to ravens, while waiting for the chance to set off once again on yet another crossing toward the country of his dreams. A true dive into the Calais Jungle, “lawless zone where communities from Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia gather without ever blending, and where poetry also finds a place to nest”, Le corbeau qui m’aimait is a “sensitive, committed, and deeply humanist novel.” 

5) Un amour infini, by Ghislaine Dunant, Albin Michel publishing

Ghislaine Dunant, born in Paris to a French mother and a Swiss father, spent her childhood and adolescence between Paris, New York, and Basel. The novel she publishes this year takes the reader to the island of Tenerife.

A three-day encounter in June 1964, soon shattered by a tragic event, brings together a Hungarian-born astrophysicist who was forced to flee Europe and take refuge in the United States, and a French mother of a family. Though nothing should bring them close, their conversations about their very different pasts, along with their exploration of the island, open them profoundly to one another. The astrophysicist’s subjects (the sky, the universe, the Earth) resonate with the sensibility of a woman who has always approached human beings through intuition and feeling. Their mutual desire is accompanied by the raw power of the surrounding elements. A man and a woman whom fate never intended to meet, and yet, over the course of a single evening and a few days, “one of the most beautiful love encounters written in recent years is born.” 

6) Tovaangar, by Céline Minard, Rivages publishing

With Tovaangar, Céline Minard, a writer known for writing in diverse literary genres, though often with a leaning toward science fiction, delivers “a luminous vision of the world to come” in what has been called “a salutary work of speculative fiction.”

Though human civilization is no more, its traces remain, enigmatic and insistent. The realms of matter and of life intertwine, ruled by new laws, new codes, a new language. In what remains of a city, Los Angeles, now renamed Hidden, its geography omnipresent, the novel unveils an extraordinary world populated by strange, captivating beings. From deserts to canyons, forests to rivers, the protagonists discover luxuriant flora and fauna, but also cultures that have forged entirely new bonds with their environment. Carried by a style “at the crossroads of genres and of unparalleled scope, this epic novel sweeps us into an unprecedented literary adventure.” A “grand demiurgic narrative”, a “philosophical and ecological fable about the re-enchantment of the world.”

7) La nuit au cœur, by Nathacha Appanah, Gallimard publishing

Nathacha Appanah, a journalist and novelist of Mauritian origin, whose family descends from Indian immigrants to Mauritius, now lives in France. Here she delivers a “gut-skewing book” that opens cracks in the darkness of the human soul, confronting the theme of femicide.

On “every page lies the impossibility of the whole truth, but also the desperate pursuit of a form of justice as close as possible to life, to the night, to the heart, to the body, to the spirit.” The narrative intertwines three stories of domestic violence: Chahinez, a 31-year-old Algerian woman burned alive by her husband in the street near Bordeaux in 2021; Emma, the author’s cousin in Mauritius, deliberately run over by her husband at the wheel of his car; and the abuse suffered by Nathacha Appanah herself, a violent behaviour that almost consumed her. La nuit au cœur walks a fine line between strength and humility, as Appanah probes “the unbearable enigma of conjugal femicide, when black night takes the place of love.”

8) L'homme qui lisait des livres, by Rachid Benzine, Julliard publishing

Is literature stronger than death? That is the question posed by Rachid Benzine, a French writer of Moroccan origin and a teacher today, in a novel where, among the smoking ruins of Gaza and the yellowed pages of books, an old bookseller waits. 

What is he waiting for? Perhaps for someone, at last, to stop and listen. Because the books he holds in his hands are not mere objects: they are “fragments of a life, shards of memory, the scars of a people.” When a young French photographer takes his camera on this old man surrounded by books, he does not know yet that he is about to cross through the looking glass. And thus begins “the Palestinian odyssey of a man who chose words as his shelter, his resistance, his homeland.” From exodus to prison, from political commitment to disillusionment, through tragedy after tragedy, his voice resonates “in a world where bombs try to have the last word.” And yet he reminds us that “books are our greatest chance at survival, not to flee reality, but to inhabit it fully. As if, in the midst of chaos, a man who reads were the most radical of revolutions.”

9) La Forêt de flammes et d'ombres, by Akira Mizubayashi, Gallimard publishing

Akira Mizubayashi, a Japanese writer who writes in French, first studied in Tokyo before completing his studies in Montpellier and entering the École Normale Supérieure on Ulm street. 

In his new novel, he offers a profoundly moving story, continuing his exploration of familiar themes: “the catastrophe of warmongering nationalisms, and art as an essential refuge against human madness.” The reader is taken to Tokyo, December 1944. Working in a postal sorting centre, the protagonist, Ren Mizuki, meets two fellow students who share his passion for European art and culture: Yuki, who will become his spouse and is herself a painter, and Bin, a violinist destined for an international career, who will remain his lifelong chosen brother. In 1945, Ren is sent to Manchuria, into the hell of combat. Disfigured, mutilated, he returns convinced he will never be able to hold a paintbrush again. Will Yuki’s love be enough to change destiny? 

10) Aucune nuit ne sera noire, by Fatou Diome, Albin Michel publishing

Fatou Diome, a Senegalese-born writer, stages an encounter with the man to whom she dedicates all her books: her grandfather. Balancing memory and invocation, the power of emotion and the cadence of language, “this tender and intimate story quietly reveals the secret of a bond that is both profoundly strong and foundational.”

The Senegalese novelist, who first gained attention in 2003 with her unforgettable The Belly of the Atlantic, has since achieved international recognition. Among the central themes she explores in her work, such as the impact of colonization, questions of identity and exile, immigration and the relationship between France and the African continent often stand out. In this new novel, the author reconnects with her “oceanic style” through a narrative that brings back to life the endearing and unforgettable figure of a grandfather, a fisherman in the Saloum. With “nostalgia and infinite tenderness”, she paints the “intimate portrait of a courageous grandfather, by whose side little Fatou learned the art of living, always placing herself above the tumult of the waves crashing against the shifting sands of existence.”