Editions Grasset & Fasquelle

61 rue des Saints-Pères, 75006 Paris, France

FRANKFURT BOOK FAIR 2022

Heidi Warneke
Rights director
hwarneke@grasset.fr

Gabriela Panaget Christiaan van Raaijen

gpanaget@grasset.fr cvanraaijen@grasset.fr
 CONTENTS

FICTION

HIGHLIGHTS

Virginie DESPENTES Cher connard 7

Claudie HUNZINGER Un chien à ma table 8

Maria LARREA Les Gens de Bilbao naissent où ils veulent 9

Joachim SCHNERF Le Cabaret des mémoires 10

Elena B. MOROZOV Oligarque 11

FIRST NOVELS

Doan BUI La Tour 12

Joy MAJDALANI Le Goût des garçons 13

Adèle ROSENFELD Les Méduses n’ont pas d’oreilles 14

NOVELS

Christophe BATAILLE Noël à Versailles 15

Gautier BATTISTELLA Chef 16

Hugo BORIS Débarquer 17

Pauline DREYFUS Le Président se tait 18

Oriane JEANCOURT GALIGNANI Quand l’arbre tombe 19

Mahir GUVEN Les Innocents 20

Dany LAFERRIERE L’Enfant qui regarde 21

Simon LIBERATI Performance 22

Vanessa SCHNEIDER La Fille de Deauville 23

Amanda STHERS Le Café suspendu / 24

Lettre d’amour sans le dire
Katharina VOLCKMER Call Boy 26

THEATRE

Delphine HORVILLEUR Il n’y a pas de Ajar 27

REMINDERS

Anne BEREST La Carte postale 28

Olivier GUEZ La Disparition de Joseph Mengele 29

 NON-FICTION

HISTORY

Patrick BARBIER Marie-Antoinette et la musique 31

Laurent JOLY La Rafle du Vel d’Hiv 32

Christophe LUCAND Le Vin des nazis 33

Barbara NECEK Femmes bourreaux 34

Michelle PERROT Le Temps des féminismes 35

with Eduardo CASTILLO

Patrick WEIL Le Président est-il devenu fou ? 36

PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

Jean-François BRAUNSTEIN La Religion woke 37

Pascal BRUCKNER Le Sacre des pantoufles / 38

Dans l’amitié d’une montagne

René GIRARD Achever Clausewitz 40

and Benoît CHANTRE édition revue et augmentée

Pierre MANENT Pascal et la proposition chrétienne 41

POPULAR SCIENCE

Audrey DUSSUTOUR L'Odyssée des fourmis 42

and Antoine WYSTRACH

François OLIVENNES Mille et un bébés 43

Thierry WOLTON Les Nouvelles routes de notre servitude 44

POLITICS – CURRENT AFFAIRS – EUROPE

Olivier GUEZ Le Grand tour 45

Laure MARCHAND Les Loups aiment la brume 46

and Guillaume PERRIER

Bruno MEYERFELD Cauchemar brésilien 47

Mathilde SALIOU Technofeminism 48

 LITERARY ESSAYS

Charles DANTZIG Proust Océan 49

Natasha FRASER-CAVASSONI True Poet: Harold Pinter, An Intimate 50

Memoir

Dany LAFERRIERE Petit traité du racisme en Amérique 51

BIOGRAPHIES & AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

Manuel CARCASSONNE Le Retournement 52

Françoise DUMAS Maîtresse de cérémonies 53

FICTION
 CHER CONNARD
Dear Arsehole
Virginie Despentes
August 2022
352 pages

Longlisted for Prix Médicis

The great return of Virginie Despentes five years after the last volume of theVernon Subutex trilogy
- translated in more than thirty languages and sold in over a million and a half copies in France!
Cher connard is an epistolary novel that tells the violence of human relationships, the female
condition, ideological postures we get stuck in, but also the rapidity and the irrevocable nature of
change. A book of rage, anger, and acceptance, it presents a gallery of broken human beings
dealing with their anguish and addiction as best as they can. Until a friendship stronger than
human weakness saves them. Like all books by Virginie Despentes, this is a text that, due to its
strong essayistic dimension, captures faithfully the heart of an era.

A series of email exchanges between friends who are saving each other's lives, Cher connard returns to the
topic that unites all of Despentes’ works: how a friendship can bring together people who, from the first
glance, have nothing in common.

Rebecca is over 50, an actress over the peak of her career, she is still beautiful and attractive. Oscar is 35
years old, a moderately well-known author, he passes his time listening to rap and trying to write a new
novel. They were both nursed on the idea of a tortured artist and are experts in drug addiction, but they feel
they’ll have to change their habits.

Zoé is in her late twenties, she is a feminist, she wants neither to excuse nor to forget, she doesn’t want to
take care of herself, doesn’t want to be fine. She is addicted to social media, and that is where she spends all
her time.

The three of them are not reliable. They are loud, opinionated, and vulnerable. Until a friendship falls upon
them and forces them to lay down their arms.

A novel that enriches the themes addressed by the author throughout her work, in particular in her essay
King Kong théorie.

Virginie Despentes published Baise-moi in 1993. She joined Editions Grasset five years later with her novel
Les Jolies choses (1998, Prix de Flore). She is the author of King Kong théorie (2006), an essay that revolutionized
feminist literature in France, Apocalypse bébé (2010, Prix Renaudot), and the Vernon Subutex trilogy
(2015-2017). She is considered today one of the main figures of the French feminism.

Rights sold: Spanish world rights (Literatura Random House), Catalan (Sembra Llibres), Croatian (under
offer), Danish (under offer), Estonian (Varrak), German (Kiepenheuer & Witsch), Greek (Stereoma), Hebrew
(Modan), Italian (Fandango), Japanese (under offer), Korean (Gimm-Young), Norwegian (under offer),
Portuguese (Portugal: Elsinore), Romanian (Trei), Russian (No Kidding press), Slovak (Inaque), Swedish
(Norstedts Forlag), English (UK: MacLehose Press / US: FSG)
Rights sold for previous titles: English (USA : Grove Atlantic, The Feminist press, FSG/UK : Serpent’s tail, Quercus
Publishing, Fitzcarraldo), German (Rowohlt, Berlin Verlag, Kiepenheuer Witsch), Arabic (Kulte), Basque (Elkarlanean),
Bosnian (Byubook), Portuguese (Brésil : Schwarcz, N1 Publications/ Portugal : Porto, Temas, Orfeu Negro, 2020 Editora), Bulgarian
(Sema, Colibri), Ukrainian (Hemiro), Catalan (Sembra Llibres), Korean (Book World Publishing, Mago Books), Croatian
(OceanMore), Galician (Hercules), Danish (Tiderne Skifter, Gyldendal), Spanish (Anagrama, Grijalbo, Melusina, Group Editorial
62, El Tinter, Penguin Random House), Estonian (Varrak), Finnish (Kustannus Oy, Rosebud Books, Like), Dutch (De Geus),
Greek (Libro Editions, Kastalia, Stereoma), Georgian (Avril Books), Hungarian (Ulpius Haz, Libri Publishing, Magveto), Islandic
(AM Forlag), Hebrew (Babel, Modan), Italian (Lit Edizioni, Einaudi, Giunti, Fandang), Japanese (Hayakawa, Kashiwa Shobo),
Latvian (Zvaigzne ABC), Lithuanian (Baltos Lankos), Macedonian (Artconnect), Norwegian (Gyldendal Norsk), Polish
(Fundacja Feminoteka, Otwarte), Romanian (Pandora, Trei), Russian (No Kidding Press, Azbooka-Atticus), Serbian (Laguna,
Booka), Slovak (Arthur), Swedish (Bonnierforlagen, Norstedts, Tiedlund), Czech (Garamond, Host), Turkish (Dogan Kitapcilik,
Sel Yayincilik, Epsilon)
UN CHIEN A MA TABLE
A Dog at my Table
Claudie Hunzinger
August 2022
288 pages

Shortlisted for Prix Femina

Longlisted for Prix Jean Giono
Longlisted for Prix Renaudot
Longlisted for Prix Médicis
Longlisted for Grand Prix de l’Académie française

Claudie Hunzinger knows better than anyone else to describe the beauty of nature, the
lives of the living beings, but also our endangered world. Un chien à ma table is a reflection
on femininity, aging, love and our relationship with nature. Sophie, the narrator of the
novel, is a writer who lives in seclusion with her partner, in the middle of a forest. Her
unexpected encounter with a runaway dog transforms the novel into an ecofeminist fable,
centred around the question of what links threatened nature with the feminist rebellion. A
true manifest of alternative life.

The main character of the novel is a dog named Yes. One day she shows up, with a broken chain
at her neck, on the porch of the house where Sophie lives with her boyfriend Grieg. From that
moment, the story of Yes becomes the central narrative. Where does she come from? Where did
she live? Is someone following her? The dog will prove to be the guardian of what characterizes
the human. But a guardian under threat.

We could also see in this novel a feminine/animal duality. It tells the great affection that binds
Sophie with the young dog, that escaped from a zoophile. Each looking after the other, until the
drama.

But this is also a novel about the love between two humans, questioning what kind of love still
binds an old couple, Sophie who likes long walks in the forest, and Grieg who is already living out
of the world, sleeping during the day, and reading at night, surviving on literature. The arrival of
Yes will reveal the love that binds this couple, already in the process of forgetting it.

Finally, this is also a novel about aging. That of the world, of a woman, of a couple. Only, in Un
chien à ma table, the narrator does not yet accept the defeat. Thanks to Yes, the novel becomes a
true ode to life.

Claudie Hunzinger is a writer and artist. She is the author of several books, among which Elles
vivaient d’espoir (2010), La Survivance (2012), La Langue des oiseaux (2014), L’Incandescnente (2016), and
Les Grands cerfs (2019), winner of the Prix Décembre.

Rights sold: German (Rowohlt), Italian (under offer)

LES GENS DE BILBAO NAISSENT
OU ILS VEULENT
People From Bilbao Are Born Where They Want
Maria Larrea
August 2022
224 pages

Longlisted for Prix Décembre

Longlisted for Prix du premier roman
Longlisted for Prix Castel
Longlisted for Prix Les Inrockuptibles

A brilliant and astonishingly talented debut novel that grabs you from page one. In elegant
and fluid writing, at once intense and full of wit, Maria Larrea recreates before our eyes the
puzzle of her family’s history and takes us on a literary journey more novelistic than fiction.
This is a story of orphans, lies and deceptive family connections. Corrida, love, and the
search of one’s self. A birth of a writer.

This story starts in Spain, with two births and two abandonments. In June 1943 in Bilbao, an obese
prostitute gives birth to a boy that she gives to the Jesuits. Later, in Galice, a woman gives birth to
a girl that she leaves with the sisters at a monastery. The boy is Julian. The girl is Victoria. They are
the parents of our narrator Maria.

In the first part of the novel, Maria recounts the childhood of her parents in parallel to her own:
Victoria is taken back by her family and suffers the rapes of her father, Julian escapes the orphanage
to join the navy… Later they will meet and leave for France for a brighter future. Victoria will
become a cleaner, and Julian a security guard at a theatre.

Maria grows up beaten by her alcoholic father, with a silent mother, mocked by her peers. But the
child of immigrants will make her own path: she will become a filmmaker, build a family, get far
from her origins.

Until one day they catch up with her: at the age of twenty-seven, a tarologist will tell her that she is
not the daughter of her parents. She will lead an investigation in order to discover the truth, against
all odds. This is the second part of the book, where the secret hidden by the protagonists will be
revealed by the narrator.

A debut novel of incredible force.

Maria Larrea is born in Bilbao in 1979. She grew up in Paris where she studied cinema at La Fémis
school. She is a director and screenwriter.

Rights sold: Spanish (Alianza)

9
LE CABARET DES MEMOIRES
The Cabaret of Memories
Joachim Schnerf
August 2022
140 pages

How will we preserve memory when the last Holocaust survivors are gone? How then the
history will be transmitted from generation to generation? This question preoccupies
Samuel, the protagonist of Le Cabaret des mémoires , the night his newborn son is arriving
home. This newcoming fatherhood makes him realise that soon there will be no one to
testify of the horrors of the last century. Thankfully, we will still have fiction and literature,
capable of revealing what we thought disappeared, to evoke the past but also the
unspeakable, to grasp the truth beneath the layers of lies, and to prevent the falsifiers from
distorting the past. A novel of rare power, tense, lyrical, and evocative.

Tomorrow morning Samuel will pick up his wife and their newborn son from the hospital. This
last night alone, at the dawn of a new life, Samuel is sleepless. Torn between anguish and
excitement, he thinks about the past, dreams of the future, and tries to take on his new role as a
father.

This night is filled with memories. He thinks about his childhood, trying to apprehend the horrors
his family has lived through during the Holocaust. He thinks of his great-aunt Rosa, who moved
to Texas after the Second World War and opened an out-of-the-ordinary cabaret. The last living
Auschwitz survivor, she now recounts her story on stage: pogroms in Poland, exile in France,
deportation at the age of 12, the death of all her family.

All these stories Samuel will have to share with his son: a child of the fourth generation born as
Rosa bids farewell to the stage. In the Cabaret of memories, the most important is to remember,
to never forget. And for Samuel, it is to understand that the child he once was should now pass
the baton to the one he is about to welcome.

An intimate and modern tale, Le Cabaret de mémoires weaves the fabric of memory and transmission
on the night of initiation. A story of universal significance.

Joachim Schnerf is born in 1987 in Strasbourg. Editor and writer, he is the author of Cette nuit,
published by Editions Zulma in 2018, winner of the prestigious Prix Orange. Le Cabaret des mémoires
is his third novel.

Rights sold: Dutch (Cossee), German (Kunstman Verlag), Italian (La Nave di Teseo)

10
OLIGARQUE
The Oligarch
Elena B. Morozov
October 2022
528 pages

Here is the great novel we have been waiting for about the transformation of Soviet
socialism into oligarchic capitalism. At the crossroads of a great Balzacian novel, a
coming-of-age story and a politico-financial thriller, Oligarque tells the story of the
prodigious rise of a young orphan in a decaying Soviet Russia to the highest spheres of
international financial power. A breathtaking story in three acts.

Perm, Russia, 1975. Grigori Yurdine, then 10 years old, loses his father – a worker in a local
factory – in a work accident. His mother, never having recovered from this tragedy, ends up in a
psychiatric hospital. Grigori, now an orphan, is adopted by a family of workers from the same
factory, who already have a child. He will now have a sister, Lena.

Grigori grows up, studies at the city's polytechnic institute and starts working in the same
factory as his father. It is now 1991 and the Soviet Union has fallen. A chess player, cold and
cynical, Grigori takes advantage of the political chaos to obtain, through fraudulent
manipulations and by leaving behind a few victims, a share in the privatisation of the factory.

London, 2008. Grigori is in his thirties, he lives in London, owns a villa in Italy and houses in
Moscow. His company owns several banks and factories, Grigori is what we call an oligarch.
Taking advantage of the financial crisis, he takes control of a prestigious British bank,
Riverside. The stock market battle for control of the bank in the middle of the subprime
mortgage crisis plunges us into an atmosphere at the crossroads of Wall Street and The Big Short.

Moscow 2020. Winner on all fronts, Yurdine is caught up by his past. Putin's regime wants to
settle the score with this westernised oligarch. His conglomerate, weakened by the pandemics, is
attacked by another oligarch loyal to the Party; his sister Lena, who has become an opponent of
the regime, is followed by the FSB, backed by a small far-right group. At the same time, an
investigation concerning an old case of unsolved murder is reopened in Perm…

Elena B. Morozov is the pseudonym of the author who wishes to remain anonymous and
who combines an intimate knowledge of Russian power circles with a rare insight in the
workings of international finance.

Rights sold: Bulgarian (Ciela)

11
LA TOUR
The Tower
Doan Bui
January 2022
352 pages

Georges Perec's La Vie mode d'emploi was published in 1978, when the district of
Olympiades was being constructed. How would Perec describe the Paris of today?
This first novel by journalist Doan Bui attempts to answer this question, by also
engaging in a meticulous topography of a place and its inhabitants. A portrait of
today's France - from the 1998 World Cup to the attacks of 2015 - in a choral novel of
grating humour.

Les Olympiades. This is where the Truong family, boat people who fled Vietnam after the fall
of Saigon, settled around the concrete slab of this group of buildings in Paris' Chinatown.
Victor Truong cherishes the imperfect subjunctive and the poetry of Vic-to-Lou-Go. Alice,
his wife, is a fan of Justin Bieber but hates Mitterrand, that damned "communist" president
elected the year their daughter Anne-Maï was born, who, after a childhood spent dreaming of
being blonde like a real Frenchwoman, finds herself single at the age of 40, to her parents'
despair.

This tower of Babel, made of bricks and mortar, where the murmur of a thousand languages
is heard, is a court of miracles filled with colourful characters. There is Ileana, the Romanian
pianist, now an exiled nanny; Virgil, the Senegalese illegal immigrant, a reader of Proust and a
virtuoso of false stories, who squats in the car park and earns his living as a hustler. We also
meet Clément, the Sarthe man who is obsessed with the Great Replacement, convinced that
he is the reincarnation of Michel Houellebecq's dog, his idol. All these destinies intersect in a
picaresque fresco of love, grief, separation and exile.

Doan Bui is a senior reporter for L'Obs, winner of the 2013 Albert Londres prize. Her latest
book, Le silence de mon père, an autobiographical account published in 2016, won the Amerigo
Vespucci prize and the Porte Dorée prize. She is also the scriptwriter of two comics. The
Tower is her first novel.

Rights sold: Vietnamese (Phuong Nam Book)

12
LE GOÛT DES GARÇONS
The Taste of Boys
Joy Majdalani
January 2022
176 pages
Collection « Le Courage »

Film and TV rights under option

A raw and delicate debut novel that portrays the awakening to sexuality of young
teenage girls in an only-girls school in Lebanon. In the cloistered atmosphere of the
Catholic school, the thirteen-year-old girls share with each other the curiosity, the fear
and the intensity of the nascent sexual desire.

They are "from a good family", "well brought up". They are schoolgirls at Our Lady of the
Annunciation. They could just as easily be in any other religious institution or a prestigious
French school. They are thirteen years old, they are inconspicuous. They have only desire in
mind.

The narrator, who is thirteen, dreams of boys, of their sex, of making love with them. They all
talk about it. There is fear, which the nuns at the school are quick to entertain by brandishing
bloody images of aborted foetuses, but fear! It adds to the curiosity.

The narrator joins forces with the terrible Bruna. A rival and confidante, she knows how to
find boys on the Internet with whom to engage in forbidden telephone conversations. Bruna
sets a trap for her, which she falls into naively. What should she do? Get close to the most
beautiful girls in the class, the Dangerous Ones? These transgressors know what to do with
their bodies.... The mean ones can call her a whore, but she must taste, taste the boy.

Legends, gossip, ignorance, fears, impulses, pitfalls, alliances, treachery, the telephone, the
Internet, everything revolves around boys and their mysterious bodies in a mixture of fantasy
and romance... Marked by a certain naivety of adolescence and the cruelty of its language, this
lucid novel depicts the violence of nascent female pleasure, told from the point of view of
young women.

Born in Lebanon in 1992, Joy Majdalani attended a Catholic school in Beirut. At the age of
eighteen, she moved to Paris and studied literature at the lycée Henri IV. She published her
first text in 2018, a short story in the magazine Le Courage, published by Grasset. The Taste of
boys is her first novel.

13
LES MEDUSES N’ONT PAS D’OREILLES
Jellyfish Have No Ears
Adèle Rosenfeld

January 2022
240 pages

A deeply moving first novel about the flaws of language, the fear of silence and the
power of the imagination. A dazzling dive into the world of the deaf and hard of
hearing.

A few sounds still reach Louise's right ear, but nothing on the left. Louise, who since childhood
has evolved in the in-between space - neither totally hearing nor totally deaf - sees her hearing
drop drastically at her last ENT examination. Faced with this inevitable loss, her doctor
suggests a cochlear implant. A true dilemma, as the operation is irreversible and will have
serious consequences for the young woman's hearing. She would lose her weak natural hearing
in favour of synthetic hearing, and with it her unique relationship with the world, full of
whispers and shadows.

Until now, Louise has always needed the lips of others to hear. It is through the light that she
can perceives the words that she then strings together, like pearls on a thread, to reconstruct
the conversation. But when the thread breaks, misunderstandings arise, eccentric images enter
her mind and fabulous characters inhabit her imagination: a soldier from the First World War,
a dog named Cirrus or a whimsical botanist who accompany her during these long months of
reflection and doubt, during which she tries to preserve her universe weaved into this sound
herbarium. An ethereal world that constantly collides with the reality of Louise's life - the
excitement of a new relationship, a first job at the town hall, a dysfunctional friendship. Time
is running out and the young woman must make her decision.

Adèle Rosenfeld was born in 1986. Jellyfish Have No Ears is her first novel.

Rights sold: Catalan (Edicions 62), English world rights (Graywolf), German (Suhrkamp
Verlag), Dutch (Bezige Bij), Italian (Piemme), Portuguese (Brazil: Fosforo), Spanish (Seix
Barral)

14
NOËL A VERSAILLES
Christmas in Versailles
Christophe Bataille
October 2022
64 pages

In the tradition of the best Christmas tales, Christophe Bataille offers us a short
paradise, which seems to escape as quickly as the snow melts in our hands. After La
Brûlure , in which the heat of summer defied life, Noël à Versailles awakens the charms
of childhood, at the foot of the Christmas tree or in the whitened paths of the park.
What if snow had taken refuge in this unforgettable tale?

"It’s snowing, Christophe, look! My sister took my hand and held it in hers. We stood against
the window, drunk with surprise, laughing to hold our breath. We were shivering, the flakes
were flying everywhere, covering the roofs and the attics, the trees in the square..."

It is Christmas and it is snowing in Versailles, as it does every year. The young boy walks along
the Rue de la Paroisse with his sister and his parents, looking for presents under bright electric
lights. Later, he will skim the golden gates, searching the windows of the castle for the
silhouette of a little king.

Snow has a power to return us to childhood. In Place Hoche, an unloved general turns his
back to the church. From the snow-covered Trianon, in the middle of the night, there seems
to play a haunting music that frightens the sister and the brother. And who is this slender little
skater in red, on the ice waving at the young man? And so the memories go on, magical and
tender, until the first evenings in the big city.

Christophe Bataille is a publisher and novelist. His books include Quartier général du bruit, Le
rêve de Machiavel, L'expérience, La Brûlure, all published by Grasset. He wrote with Rithy Panh
L'élimination and La paix avec les morts (January 2020), which won the Marguerite Duras Prize
and the Ecrivains du Sud Essay Prize.

Rights sold for previous titles: English (New Directions), Korean (Munhakdongne, Random
House Korea), Spanish (Tusquets), Greek (Astarti), Italy (Einaudi), Japanese (Suisei-Sha),
Dutch (Vassallucci), Romanian (Humanitas)

15
CHEF
Chef
Gautier Battistella
February 2022
336 pages

TV rights under option

The first great novel dedicated to French gastronomy, Chef portrays the violence of a
macho world where drugs, alcohol and sex are often the only things that keep people
going. But in counterpoint to this is the passion that this profession and craft inspires
in its practitioners, who are determined to perpetuate and reinvent its magic, beauty
and excellence. A novel of flesh and blood, full of suspense.

‘Les Promesses’ is a three-star Michelin restaurant frequented by a clientele from as far afield
as Singapore, Dubai and San Francisco. It is a remarkable success story, consecrated when its
62-year-old owner Paul Renoir is voted the ‘world’s best chef’ by his peers. But one Monday
morning his body is found next to the hunting rifle that he has used to take his own life. The
world of fine dining is stunned and in mourning. What pushed this exceptional chef to end it
all?

Just before he died, a crew from Netflix had come to make a feature about Renoir that
explored his family memories, where his vocation came from, and the stages in his road to
success. Perhaps somewhere in his story lies the secret behind his suicide, unless the answer is
to be found in the battle that ensues over his estate. Tensions quickly mount between his
widow Natalia, sous-chef Christophe, his son Mathias, and his unscrupulous professional rival
Albinoni. In the wake of the king’s sudden death, pretenders to the throne emerge, plots take
shape, and a battle of the egos unfolds…

But Chef is also the story of French cuisine since the Second World War. Paul learnt everything
from his grandmother, who was a friend of the celebrated Lyon cook, Eugénie Brazier. It was
women who invented fine dining before men appropriated it and elevated it to its central place
in modern culture. Alongside Bocuse, Loiseau and Ducasse, Paul Renoir is one of the pioneers
of the Nouvelle Cuisine of the 1970s, when chefs first began to achieve the kind of star status
that they enjoy today.

A contributor to the Michelin Guide for fifteen years and a friend of some of France’s greatest
chefs, Gautier Battistella is an undisputed world expert on fine dining, as well as being very
familiar with the workings and secrets of restaurant guides. He is the author of Un jeune homme
prometteur (Grasset, 2014, Prix Québec-France and Prix Jean-Claude Brialy, LGF, 2017) and Ce
que l’homme a cru voir (Grasset, 2018, LGF, 2021).

Rights sold: Japanese (Tokyo Shogensha), Portuguese (Brazil: L&PM)

16
DEBARQUER
Landing
Hugo Boris
August 2022
198 pages

The author of Police , adapted to screen by Anne Fontaine in 2020, starring Virginie Efira
and Omar Sy in the main roles, Hugo Boris takes us this time to the places of the
Normandy landing, in a breath-taking novel on memory, grief, and reconciliation. Taking
place during one summer day, Débarquer offers a singular angle and a new way of thinking
about this historic event, whose 80th anniversary we will celebrate this summer.

A young woman in her early thirties, Magali is a tourist guide of the Normandy landing sights. After
the mysterious disappearance of her husband, she lives alone with her young children in an isolated
house on Omaha Beach. One day, when she is feeling particularly low, her agency proposes to her
to accompany a June 6th veteran: a lucky event for a guide. She accepts and meets, on a windy train
station at Bayeaux, Andrew Calkins.

Arrived in France alone from the United States, this 90 years-old veteran has no one to accompany
him on this memorial trip. Thus starts a difficult friendship that will reconcile both of the characters
with their past and will allow Magali to start a new life.

In the traces of the terrible Battle of Villers-Bocage, through memorial beaches and the dizzying
field of white crosses of the American cemetery, we follow the tragic and luminous trajectory of
the two lost souls who will be saved by this encounter.

A former assistant director, Hugo Boris is the author of six acclaimed by the critics and prize-
winning books. He published Police in 2016, which was later adapted to screen by Anne Fontaine,
and bought by more than 30 countries, and, in 2020, Le Courage des autres.

Rights sold for Police : German (Ullstein), Spanish (Alianza), Russian (AST)

17
LE PRESIDENT SE TAIT
The President Remains Silent
Pauline Dreyfus
August 2022
252 pages

Longlisted for Prix Castel

Longlisted for Grand Prix de l'Académie française

All the talent of Pauline Dreyfus for social comedies which are not without tragedy shines
through in Le Président se tait - a satirical, caustic, and very playful novel. Taking
inspiration from a political episode from the late 1970s, the author constructs the novel
around twelve very different characters. Despite their differences, they all expect the same
thing: answers… and a presidential address!

1979. A political scandal has just exploded, shaking the mandate of the French President Valéry
Giscard d'Estaing: The Diamonds Affair. For the President (who is never explicitly named in the
text), this is the beginning of the end. He becomes the object of all the speculations, all the
interrogations: is it true that he accepted the diamonds from an African dictator? Instead of giving
an answer, the President will remain silent for 49 days, hiding behind his offended silence.

So, others will speak for him. In this novel, constructed as a round, Pauline Dreyfus summons, one
by one, a dozen of fictional characters: a Portuguese immigrant, a nightclubber, a Russian dissident,
an aspiring journalist, an appalled head of protocol at the Elysée Palace, a ruined nobleman, an
unemployed barfly, a feminist activist, an inspector from the General Inquiries…

All of them have a say in the Affair, all are being shaken up in this peculiar political season.
Diamonds are one of those objects Gods use to play with human destinies. On the day the
President decides to talk, all the protagonists of this story are in front of their TV. They have been
waiting for an explanation for so long! Will they finally get one?

Pauline Dreyfus is a writer. Her works include Immortel, enfin (2012, prix des Deux Magots), Ce
sont des choses qui arrivent (2014), and Le Déjeuner des barricades (2017). She received the Prix Goncourt
de la biography for her biography of Paul Morand (2020).

Rights sold for Le déjeuner des barricades : Spanish (Anagrama), Greek (Patakis)

18
QUAND L’ARBRE TOMBE
When a Tree Falls
Oriane Jeancourt Galignani
August 2022
200 pages

Shortlisted for Prix Femina

The story of Quand l’arbre tombe is one of a shattering simplicity: that of a daughter’s love
for her father. Once powerful and worldly, he is now aging and takes refuge in the park of
his country house so that no one notices that his eyesight is failing, that his thoughts are
waning, and that the end is near. Locked up for seven days in a family huis-clos, father and
daughter must, before leaving each other for good, review the past, even if it means
disturbing some well-kept secrets.

A country house. A big park. Trees there are falling without any apparent reason. An old man, the
owner of the house, is worried and writes to his daughter. She comes to join him, without allowing
herself to think that this call for help may be the last one. Her father, so strong, so active, so
authentically admirable, is now retired and deprived of his social status.

Paul will try to talk to Zélie, and Zélie will try to talk to Paul. It remains between them a feeling
that is difficult to elucidate: the love of a father and a daughter. A discreet and sometimes painful
encounter unfolds. Day by day Zélie is pained by seeing him defeated.

Walking side by side in the old park where the trees are falling, the old man and the young woman
are trying to say what they have never dared to say. They come back to the place where fifteen
years earlier they failed to save their son and brother Frédéric. A third character arrives to disrupt
their reunion: Luc, Frédéric’s ex-boyfriend. He forces Zélie et Paul to face their tragic past.

What is a daughter’s love for a father? What is a buried family secret? What is a man once his life
is over, stripped of power, social aura, and moral reckoning? A novel of simple and tragic beauty,
that reveals the literary maturity of Oriane Jeancourt Galignani.

Oriane Jeancourt Galignani is a novelist, literary and theatre critic, and the editor-in-chief of a
cultural review. She is the author of Mourir est un art, comme tout le reste (2013), L’Audience (2014),
Hamadar (2017, Prix de la Closérie des Lilas), and La Femme-écrevisse (2020).
LES INNOCENTS
The Innocent Ones
Mahir Guven
March 2022
496 pages

Mahir Guven, the author of the widely acclaimed debut novel Big Brother, winner of the
Prix Goncourt 2018 in the category “First novel”, returns with a magnificent contemporary
drama that brings to light the lives of the invisible and the humble: the youth of the French
suburban middle classes, living off the city’s periphery. Les Innocents brilliantly mixes the
tragic and the wonderful, the lightness of first times and the scrutiny of adult age. In a
tender, musical and joyful prose, full of humour and vitality, Les Innocents evokes some
of the best texts of Romain Gary.

Noé Stéphan, 35 years old, is detained by the police. He is accused of premeditated murder of his
friend, who had beaten up his own wife. Noah pleads his innocence; it was an accident.

As Noé's wife Ayla, a lawyer, is delaying joining him at the police station, the interrogation becomes
more and more violent. Noé tries to escape but heats his head and is thrown into the cell half-
unconscious. He is about to die, he calls for help, and it is at this moment that the memories of
his childhood appear: here he is before the court of his own conscience, presided by his mother.
To get out free Noé must prove to the court that he is innocent.

So how did he get there? Here he is as a child, at Saint-Sébastien-sur-Loire, near Nantes. An

innocent age marked by the absence of a father, and with a mother, La Joce, who works as a temp
to support Noé and his brother, a philosophy student. On his mother's order, Noé plays with the
girls at the playground to avoid violence but finds himself the victim of a gang of boys.

First loves, first times come and go, while the absent father – a sailor in the family legend but
actually in prison – dies in a car accident the day of his dismissal. Noé then continues to grow up
without a reference paternal figure. On the verge of his adolescence, Noé learns that his father was
part of a Breton independence network and decides to investigate his past.

With love in all its guises, sport, sex, parties and fights, he discovers the violence inherent to life.
Beware of mother Joce's judgement... if he wakes up from the coma into which the head trauma
plunged him.

Mahir Guven is born in 1986, he was executive director of America and Le 1 journals and is
currently the literary director of La Grenade collection of the JC Lattès publishing house. In 2017,
he published Grand frère (éditions Philippe Rey), Prix Goncourt du premier roman 2018, Prix
Première 2018, Prix Régine-Deforges 2018, Prix de la Francophonie 2018, finalist for the Prix
Médicis 2017, translated into fourteen languages. Les Innocents is his second novel.

Rights sold for Grand frère: World English (Europa Editions), German (Aufbau), Arabic (Egypte :
Al arab), Catalan (Bromera), Croatian (Sandorf), Danish (Jensen & Dalgaard), Spanish (Navona
Editorial), Greek (Ikaros Publishing), Italian (Edizioni E/O), Hebrew (Tamir Sendik), Dutch (Ambo
Anthos), Portuguese (Gradiva), Polish (Czarna owca), Turkish (Can).

20
L’ENFANT QUI REGARDE
The Child Who Looks
Dany Laferrière
March 2022
64 pages

Dany Laferrière, member of the Académie française and novelist translated in multiple
languages, returns after several graphic novels with a masterfully written novella: a
tragic portrait of an attractive and cultured man, rejected by the society.

Monsieur Gérard, a former teacher who was dismissed from a girls' school and known as a
seducer, hardly leaves his house anymore. The narrator, a child from a poor neighborhood in
Port-au-Prince, discovers a fascination for this mysterious figure of exquisite manners and rare
good taste. Monsieur Gérard introduces the child to Baudelaire, Keats and Wagner.

Rumors abound. Why doesn’t he leave the house? Professor Désir thinks that is because he is
in love with a beautiful young woman, or probably with a mother of one of his students, or
maybe he is impotent… According to Doctor Hyppolite, a man had slapped him in a bar,
without him being able to respond... Everything is enigmatic about this man who seems to live
in distress.

What hides behind his mystery and charm? We will find out following the narrator: a child of
rare intelligence and delicacy.

Dany Laferrière returns to his first love: poetic and profoundly literary writing.

Born in Port-au-Prince in 1953, Dany Laferrière is the winner of Prix Médicis 2009 for
L’Engime de retour, he was elected member of Académie française in 2013. He is the author of Je
suis un écrivain japonais (Grasset, 2008), L’Art presque perdu de ne rien faire (Grasset, 2014) and three
graphic novels : Autoportrait de Paris avec chat, L’Exil vaut le voyage and Sur la route avec Bashô.

Rights sold for previous titles: English (Quercuq, Douglas & Mcintyre, Arsenal Pulp,
WWB), German (Das Wunderhorn), Castilian (Argentina: El cuenco de plata, Spain: Alianza,
Pepitas de Calabaza), Chinese (Shanghai 99, Haitan Publishing), Korean (Thinking Tree, Open
Books), Creol (Leve association), Danish (Turbine Forlaget), Greek (Thines Editions), Italian
(New Books, 66ans2ns), Japanese (Fujiwara Shoten), Polish (Weltbild Polska), Romanian
(Echinox), Russian (Text), Serbian (Laguna), Czech (Argo).

21
PERFORMANCE
Performance
Simon Liberati
August 2022
252 pages

Longlisted for Prix Renaudot

A 71 years-old writer, recovering from a stroke, is incapable of writing. A commission of a

scenario for a mini-series about Rolling Stones is a benediction. He accepts and plunges
into the roaring 60s of the Stones. Appeased by the work, he can now pursue his affair with
the 23 years-old Esther, the beautiful daughter of her ex-wife. A sharp portrayal of the
superficiality of the cinema world in the rock-n-roll, galloping style of Simon Liberati.

Titled Satanic Majesties, the series will show how a group of thugs, compilators of Afro-American
music have become over two years - between the arrest of Keith Richards and Mick Jaggers for
drug use in 1967 and the stupefying death of Brian Jones in 1969 - the world-famous androgyne
starts we all know.

Inspired anew by the game of Satanic Majesties, he reconnects, through Esther's grace, with a part
of innocence and brings Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg and Brian Jones back from the abyss
of time.

And if the man's innocence fades with time, the brilliance of this novel proves Simon Liberati's
dazzling literary talent. At times burlesque, often moving, addictive, unbridled: a beautiful
adventure of a writer seizing the last snippets that life grants him.

Simon Liberati is a writer and journalist. He is the author of twelve books, among which Jayne
Mansfield 1967 (Grasset, 2011, prix Femina), Eva (Stock, 2015) and California girls (Grasset, 2016).

Rights sold for Jayne Mansfield 1967 : Italian (Fandango)

22
LA FILLE DE DEAUVILLE
The Girl from Deauville
Vanessa Schneider
March 2022
272 pages

After Tu t’appelais Maria Schneider, here is the new novel by Vanessa Schneider, that
takes us to the heart of the Action direct terrorist community. In the mid-1980s its
activists sowed as many dreams of the Absolute as there were dead bodies on their
way... Filled with hopes and cries, but also melancholy and tenderness, this novel
about brutality and impossibility of the revolution – in the vein of Olivier Assayas’
Carlos or Olivier Rolin’s Paper tigers – tells the story of an encounter between a cop
and a young terrorist – the girl from Deauville. Compelling and moving read.

In the mid-1980s, a group of young, radicalized people decided to bring fire and blood to the
streets of France. To destroy capitalism and ruling classes that incarnate it, they have opted
for armed confrontation. Robberies, bombings, assassinations… Terrorists strike and then
disappear, in a pungent blast of leaflets, explosives and terror. Their war name: Action directe.
The police hang their portraits on every corner of French cities. An intense and chaotic chase
then commence, led by seasoned cops who follow their tracks from the streets of Lyon to the
most remote farms, from suburban housing projects to radical left-wing bookshops. Luigi
Pareno, a solitary and troubled cop, methodical and taciturn, devotes all his energy, rage and
time to the case.

Followed and in hiding, last members of the group love, desire and tear each other apart, as if
waiting for an inevitable end. Luigi Pareno's life hangs on their capture. A young, smart-
looking woman, always dressed in jeans, is particularly important to Pareno. The police call
her "the girl from Deauville" while waiting to put a name to her face. Joëlle Aubron, born in
the upper class, will become one of the two murderers of Action directe. Pareno observes her
from a distance, from the streets of Paris to the prison cell where she is held for a time, from
a hideout in Belgium to the snowy Loiret where she hides with her friends Jean-Marc Rouillan
and Nathalie Ménigon. She intrigues him, he hates her as much as he gets attached.

Vanessa Schneider is an author and reporter for Le Monde. Her books include Tu t'appelais
Maria Schneider (2018 - 30,000 copies sold in hardback) and, with Georges Kiejman, L'homme
qui voulait être aimé (2021).

Rights sold for Tu t’appelais Maria Schneider : English (Simon and Schuster), Spanish (De
Aqui), Japanese (Hayakawa).

23
LE CAFE SUSPENDU
Suspended coffee
Amanda Sthers
May 2022
234 pages

A gifted storyteller, Amanda Sthers takes inspiration in an old Neapoltanian tradition

to write a summer novel where human and love encounters intertwine. Written in an
elegant prose, Le café suspendu takes us to one of the most beautiful Italian towns
through a fine portrayal of human sentiments. An ode to solidarity and humanity.

« When you order a coffee in Naples, you can pay for two and the second cup will be offered to those who can’t
afford it. On the black chalkboard of the bar, it is marked as caffè sospeso: suspended coffee. These are the
stories that I’ve collected during the last 40 years in a little bar named “Nube”. They are linked by an invisible
thread of suspended coffee. For those who offer, and those who receive, there is a story in the cup. »

The narrator, Jacques Madelin, a French man based in Naples since the end of his relationship,
spends all his time in a café in downstairs of his building. He observes and takes note of those
who meet, run into each other, separate, hide or search. A crocodile skin turned into a precious
bag, a cheated-on woman who makes a deal with her rival to keep her husband, a young
woman trying to get rid off her grandmother’s scarf to start a new life, a writer of thousand
faces, a man afraid of falling asleep, and even a Chinese doctor who wishes to cure healthy
people…

While telling these stories full of humanity, fantasy, history and legend, the narrator draws a
moving self-portrait throughout the pages. It is equally a book about charity, and about the
way generosity affects our destinies.

Amanda Sthers is a writer and screenwriter. Her first play, Le vieux juif blonde (2006), brought
her international acclaim. She is the author of eleven novels, including Chicken Street (2005),
Madeleine (2007), Les Promesses (2015 – adapted to screen in 2021, with Kelly Reilly and Jean
Reno in main roles), and Lettre d’amour sans le dire (2020 – 45.000 copies sold).

Rights sold for previous titles: German (Penguin Random House), English (Austral
Books, Wyatt-MacKenzi, Bloomsbury Publishing), Bulgarian (Colibri), Korean (Hemingway),
Spanish (Argentina: Ilhsa Grupo), Hebrew (Matar), Italian (Mondadori & Adriano Salani),
Romanian (Echinox), Polish (Noir sur blanc), Turkish (Everest)

24
LETTRE D’AMOUR SANS LE DIRE
Scenes From My Private Life
Amanda Sthers
June 2020
140 pages

Prix France Télévisions Roman

In this long, tender and sensual love letter, Amanda Sthers recounts the story of an
awakening. It is the awakening of Alice, a woman who has been alone for too long,
and who, following an unexpected encounter in a poetic Japanese-inspired Paris of
bewitching charm, is finally ready to live her life.

Alice is a 48-year-old former French teacher whose life consists of reading and daydreams. Of
modest origins, she was damaged by her previous romantic relationships and has definitively
renounced her womanhood. The only company she has is her daughter, whom she had very
young. When the novel begins, Alice is the prisoner of a monotonous daily life and painful
memories.

Everything changes the day she stops into a Parisian tea salon. Here she meets a Japanese
masseur of extraordinary delicacy who reconciles her with her body, her femininity and her
sensuality. He makes her glimpse the possibility of happiness. This man very soon becomes
the centre of her existence. She starts learning Japanese and reading the great classics of
Japanese literature in order to get closer to him. Alice is in love... and finally living out her first
true love story.

Over the course of a whole year, she regularly returns for massages without ever revealing her
feelings to him. Yet she is persuaded that they are reciprocated, persuaded by the smallest of
gestures. But the very day she decides that she has mastered Japanese to a level where she can
reveal to him how she feels, she finds that the man has disappeared... So Alice writes him a
long letter in which she recounts her story, in entirety, and declares her love for him.
Everything she did not know how to say to him, she will write for him...

Amanda Sthers is a writer, filmmaker, and playwright. Her first play, The Old Blond Jew (2006)
earned her international renown. Unspoken Love Letter is her tenth novel, following, in
particular, Chicken Street (2005), Madeleine (2007) and The Promises (2015).

Rights sold: Italian (Mondadori)

Right sold for previous titles: Bulgarian (Colibri), English (Austral Books), German
(Penguin Random House), Hebrew (Matar), Italian (Adriano Salani, Mondadori), Korean
(Hemingway Korea), Romanian (Echinox), Spanish (Ilhsa group), Polish (Noir sur blanc),
Turkish (Everest Yayinlary)

25
CALL BOY
Katharina Volckmer
UK publication chez Firzcarraldo Editions in September 2023
French publication by Grasset in early 2024

124 pages

After The Appointment, a radical hilarious and transgressive roller-coaster, highly

acclaimed by the international literary scene and translated into 18 languages,
Katharina Volckmer continues to explore the themes of identity, exile, and trauma.
Her powerful second novel Call Boy s a journey into the sadness and the joy of
not fitting in, of working where no one else can see you and the allure of finding
sexual excitement where you least expect it.

‘Thank you for waiting. My name is Jimmie. How can I help you today?’

Jimmie is a chubby one-time drama school graduate who does the late shifts in the London-
based call centre of an international online travel agent. During the day, he is dealing with
customer complaints from all over Europe and at night, Jimmie is left alone with emergency
calls from the US, his conflicting desires and the ambition to have a successful body. As the
novel follows one day in this young Italian immigrant’s life, we meet his customers and their
longing for pleasure as well as his colleagues and their dreams of making it in this city. There is
Wolf, the strange German with a missing toe, Helen, the Catalan beauty, Elin, Jimmie’s
healthy Swedish friend and Daniel, the curvy Israeli actor who is now his superior.

On this particular day, Jimmie is called in for a chat by his manager, Simon. The situation
seems serious and whilst we wait with him to see whether he will finally get fired for yet another
transgression, we learn about intimacy and friendship, about how sexual tensions, trauma and
the pain we inflict on ourselves and others ultimately constitute a workplace. We learn about
orange toilets and the perfect lipstick, about migrations, sad Italian mothers, and the challenges
of acting out an identity that allows us to function in the modern world. Last but not least, we
learn how Jimmie lost his dream job of being an actor at a funeral parlour…

Katharina Volckmer was born in Germany in 1987. She lives in London, where she works
for a literary agency. Following the international success of The Appointment, Katharina once
again shows with this new novel that she is ‘a risk taker of the first degree’ (Ian McEwan).

Rights sold: English (UK: Fitzcarraldo), Italian (La Nave di Teseo), Portuguese (Brazil:
Fosforo)

Rights sold for The Appointmen t : Catalan (La Campana), Bosnian (Buybook),
Croatian (Fraktura), Danish (Sisyfos), Dutch (Arbeiderspers), English (UK: Fitzcarraldo, USA:
Avid Reader), German (Kanon), Greek (Potamos), Icelandic (Hringana), Italian (La
Nave di Teseo), Polish (Pauza Anita Musiol), Portuguese (Materia Escuda),
Russian (Corpus), Serbian (Dereta), Slovak (Laputa), Spanish (Anagrama), Turkish (Ithaki)

26
IL N’Y A PAS DE AJAR
There Is No Ajar
Delphine Horvilleur
September 2022
96 pages

Paris theater premier in December 2022

After Vivre avec nos morts - more than 200.000 copies sold in France and translated into ten
languages! - Delphine Horvilleur returns with a theatre play in the form of a monologue. A man,
played on the stage by a woman, explains to us how literature can offer us a certain liberty of
identity.

The vice of identity obsessions, exclusionary tribalism, and victimhood competitions is tightening around
us. It is screwed tighter every day by those who defend the idea of a 'pure self', and an 'authentic' affiliation
to nation, ethnicity, or religion. We are suffocating and yet, for years, one man has held a key to
emancipation: Emile Ajar.

This man doesn’t exist. He is a literary invention, the name Romain Gary was using to show that we aren’t
always what we say we are, and that it is possible to reinvent oneself or become someone else through
fiction. Delphine Horvilleur takes inspiration in this personage to write a monologue against identity, a one-
man show that attacks violently all the modern identity obsessions.

The protagonist of the play, a man played on the stage by a woman, says to be Abraham Ajar, the son of
Emile: the offspring of a literary trick. He asks the reader and the viewer, who visits him in the infamous
Jewish Hole of La Vie devant soi: are you coming from your parents or from the books you have read? Are
you sure of the identity you are pretending to possess?

Addressing a mysterious companion, Abraham Ajar takes us on tour of Romain Gary’s universe, but also
that of the kabbalah, the Bible, the Jewish humour, or also modern political debates on nationalism,
transidentity, antisemitism, genre, and cultural appropriation.

The text is prefaced by Delphine Horvilleur’s essay on Romain Gary and his work. The play will be staged
at the Théâtre des Plateaux sauvages (Paris), from 19th to 24 September 2022, created by Johanna Nizard
and Arnaud Aldigé, and interpreted by Johanna Nizard. Numerous representations are previewed between
September and February 2023 in theaters around France. The Parisian premiere will take place on December
2022 at Théâtre du Rond-Point.

Rabby of Judaisme en Mouvement, Delphine Horvilleur is the editor-in-chief of the Tenou’a review. She
is the author of En tenue d’Eve : féminin, pudeur et judaïsme (Grasset, 2013), Comment les rabbins font des enfants :
sexe, transmission, identité dans le judaïsme (Grasset, 2015), Réflexions sur la question antisémite (Grasset, 2019) and
Vivre avec nos morts (Grasset, 2021).

Rights sold for previous titles: German (Hanser Verlag), English (Europa Editions, Quercus Publishing),
Spanish (Argentine: Libros del Zorzal, Spain: Libros del Asteroid), Korean (Bookhouse Publishers), Greek
(Polis), Hebrew (Locus Publishing), Italian (Giunti, Qiqajon, Einaudi), Japanese (Hayakawa), Dutch
(Arbeidersper Uitgeverij), Romanian (FCER Editura), Czech (Garamond)

27
LA CARTE POSTALE
The Postcard
Anne Berest

August 2021
512 pages

Le Grand Prix des Lectrices de ELLE

Prix Renaudot des Lycéens
Choix Goncourt des Etats-Unis

In January 2003, amidst all the usual greeting cards, a strange postcard appeared in the
letterbox. There was no sign-off, no return address: the writer wished to remain
anonymous. The Opéra Garnier was on one side, four names on the other: two belonging
to the grandparents of Anne Berest's mother, the other two to her aunt and uncle. All four
died in Auschwitz in 1942. This book recounts at once her investigation, the story of her
ancestors and her discovery of what being Jewish means to a secular life.

Twenty years on, Berest decides to discover who had sent them the mysterious postcard. With
the help of her mother, she carries out an investigation that leaves no stone unturned. Assisted by
a private detective and criminologist, she questions the inhabitants of the village in which her
family had been detained.

This investigation draws her back a century into the past. She retraces the quixotic story of the
Rabinovitches, their flight from Russia, odyssey across Latvia and Palestine, and, finally, their
arrival in France, Paris - then war. She seeks to understand how it was that her grandmother
Myriam was the only one to escape deportation, and to shed light on the mysteries surrounding
her two marriages.

She moves heaven and earth in the attempt, and ultimately succeeds.

Anne Berest has published several novels including La Fille de son père (Seuil, 2010), Les Patriaches
(Grasset, 2012), Sagan 1954 (Stock, 2014), Recherche femme parfaite (Grasset, 2016), Gabriële, co-
written with her sister Claire (Stock, 2017), as well several plays: La Visite and Les filles de nos filles
(Actes Sud, 2020).

Rights sold: Croatian (Naklada Ljevak), Danish (Alpha forlag), Dutch (Nieuw Amsterdam),
English world rights (Europa Editions), German (Berlin Verlag), Italian (Edizioni E/O), Hebrew
(Modan), Hungarian (Trubadur), Japanese (Hayakawa), Latvian (Zvaigzne ABC), Lithuanian
(Baltos Lankos), Polish (W.A.B.), Romanian (Trei), Russian (under offer), Spanish world rights
(Lumen), Swedish (under offer)

Rights sold for Recherche femme parfaite : German (Aufbau, Knaus Verlag), Korean (All
that books), Italian (Neri Pozza), Spanish (Penguin Random House), Russian (AST)

28
LA DISPARITION DE JOSEPH MENGELE
The Disappearance of Josef Mengele
Olivier Guez
August 2017
240 pages

Film adaptation coming soon!

Longlisted for Prix Goncourt, Prix Goncourt des lycéens and Prix Interallié
Shortlisted for Prix Renaudot, Prix Medicis and Prix Landerneau
Finalist for Prix Jean Giono

After a 30-year manhunt, Josef Mengele, the torturing doctor of Auschwitz, and one of Nazism’s
most emblematic figures, died in South America under mysterious circumstances. This powerful,
geopolitical thriller is the result of an in-depth investigation of perhaps the Third Reich’s
most secretive man, and portrays the captivating deconstruction of the myth behind “the
Angel of Death.” It invites readers to explore the depths of evil.

Hiding behind several different pseudonyms, protected by networks and his family’s
money, and supported by a community in Buenos Aires that still dreams of a founding a
Fourth Reich, Mengele believes he can invent a new life for himself... In Germany, it
is a time of reconstruction. Peron’s Argentina is benevolent. And the entire world simply wants to
forget. But soon the chase is on again, first by the Mossad, then by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.
With the help of sympathizers, Mengele finds temporary refuge in a remote farm in Brazil. From
then on, he will never have a moment’s rest. He survives through paranoia, but becomes the
claustrophobic prisoner of his own hopeless situation. He will eventually be found dead, having
drowned on a beach along the Brazilian coast.

How could the SS doctor possibly slip through the cracks of an international investigation spanning three
decades? What complicity was there between West Germany and South America, and how did he benefit
from it? This untold and disturbing story shines a light on geopolitical mutations, the
way historical perspectives change, and the process by which the world learned about the
Holocaust. Here, Nazi atrocities overlap with the modernity of the 1960s and 1970s, leaving us with
our Western ambiguities. And with the question: What do we do with men who have committed acts of
evil?

This highly anticipated book recounts Josef Mengele’s terrifying odyssey through South America – a place
where former Nazis, Mossad agents, greedy women and dictators make their way in a world corrupted by
fanaticism, money, and ambition.

Olivier Guez is a writer, journalist, and screenwriter. He has published a number of works,
including L’impossible retour, une histoire des juifs en Allemagne depuis 1945 (2007), Eloge de
l’esquive (2014) and Les Révolutions de Jacques Koskas (2014). He is a regular contributor to Le Monde, Le
Point, The New York Times and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). In 2016, he received the
German Film Award for Best Screenplay, for the film The People vs. Fritz Bauer.

Rights sold : Albanian (Albas), Bulgarian( Iztok-Zapad), Castilian (Tusquets), Chinese (Haitian), Croatian
(Meandar Media), Czech (Garamond), Estonian (Eesti Raamat), Danish (Franske Bogcafes), Dutch
(Meulenhoff), English (UK : Verso), German (Aufbau Verlag), Greek (Kritiki), Hebrew (Hakibutz),
Hungarian (Muvelt Nep), Italian (Neri Pozza), Japanese (Tokyo Sogensha), Korean (The Open Books),
Lithuanian (Zara), Polish (Sonia Draga), Portuguese (Planeta), Portuguese for Brazil (Intrinseca),
Romanian (Meteor Press), Russian (Knizhniki), Serbian (Carobna), Slovak (Marencin), Slovenian 29
(Mladinska Knijga), Turkish (Profil), Vietnamese (Nha Nam)
NON-FICTION
MARIE-ANTOINETTE ET LA MUSIQUE
Marie-Antoinette and music
Patrick Barbier
January 2022
448 pages

Few women have aroused so much passion, provoked so many contradictory

comments, and given rise to so many biographies: Marie-Antoinette is not a queen like
the others and we tend to rediscover her today under less known aspects. This book
looks for the first time at the strong links she had with music. A new look at the most
music-loving queen and musician in French history.

From her studies in Vienna to the discovery of the French musical world, through her passion
for the harp, the pianoforte and singing, but also for opera and comic opera, we discover in
this book the relationship that Marie-Antoinette had with music, her tastes and also her
support for the performances of the court or Paris.

Indeed, from her arrival at the age of 14 until the dark days of the Tuileries, we discover the
important role she played in the cultural society of the late eighteenth century, her connections
with theater audiences and artists, as well as her influence on the evolution of the repertory
and the technical progress of instruments.

Thanks to this transversal study that encompasses music and arts, but also politics, society and
anecdotes of daily life, Patrick Barbier offers an innovative and reference essay, by one of the
greatest French specialists of Baroque music.

Patrick Barbier, a music historian and Italianist, is the author of numerous works on music
and society: Histoire des Castrats (1989), translated into twelve languages, Farinelli (1994) and
Pour l'amour du baroque (2019) among others. His Voyage dans la Rome baroque (2016) was awarded
the Prix Thiers by the Académie Française in 2017.

Rights sold for previous titles: German (Econ Verlag, Zsolnay), English (UK : Souvenir
Press), Korean (Ilchokak, Burum), Spanish (Espagne : Planeta/Argentine : Javier Editora),
Italian (Rizzoli Libri), Japanese (Chikuma Shobo, Fukutake Shoten), Dutch (Van Gennep,
Bruna), Polish (BVolumen Oficyna), Portuguese (Brazil : Nova Fronteira/Portugal : Livros
do Brasil), Russian (Ivan Limbakh)

31
LA RAFLE DU VEL D’HIV
The Vel d’Hiv Round-Up
Laurent Joly
May 2022
400 pages

The “Vel d’Hiv” round-up is one of the most tragic events that happened in France
during Occupation. The fruit of a long-term research, Laurent Joly – one of the biggest
French experts on the Occupation and the Collaboration periods – brings to light new
elements of this terrible and incomprehensible episode of the contemporary history.

In less than two days, on 16th and 17th of July 1942, 12 884 men, women and children were
arrested by the Parisian police following an illegal arrangement between the German
authorities and the government of Vichy. Only about a hundred of these detainees will survive
the hell of the Nazis camps.

This emblematic and monstrous operation remains less known. The administrative
background and police logistics of the round-up have been little studied, and never in detail.
Laurent Joly corrects the inaccuracies and legends that continue to circulate today.

The ambition of this book is to propose a global and detailed history of the Vel d’Hiv round-
up, taking a closer look at the personalities, those of the persecuted as well as the persecutors,
at their state of mind, their everyday life, and the margins of their decision-making. Moreover,
Laurent Joly attempts a global historical account, restoring the multitude of the points of view
and reconstructing the context of Nazi politics and state collaboration.

A largely unpublished research, well-documented and varied, enriched with archival research,
witness testimonies and an unprecedented in its scale study of the Jewish files of the Prefecture
of Police of Paris. But the most important part of the investigation consisted in recovering
police officers' testimonies: 4000 files on the legal purge of policemen were examined, more
of 150 of which concerned the round-up and its consequences. These files contain victims’
and witness’ testimonies and multiple arrest reports, which have never been published before.

Laurent Joly is Head of research at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS), he is
the author of several texts on the Holocaust, antisemitism and the government of Vichy, all
published with Grasset: Vichy dans « la solution finale » (2006), L’antisémitisme de bureau (2011),
Xavier Vallat (2001), L’Etat contre les Juifs – Vichy, les nazis et la persécution antisémite (2018) et La
falsification de l'Histoire (2022).

32
LE VIN DES NAZIS
The Nazis’ Wine
Christophe Lucand
March 2023
300 pages

May 1940. France fell, and so did its wine. Based on exceptional sources, economic
and judicial funds, archives and private documents, this fascinating and complete Le
Vin des nazis reveals how, at the heart of the greatest vineyards, on the tables of the
great Parisian restaurants and mansions, the French defeat was quickly drowned in
wine, intoxicating unscrupulous collaborators up to the worst criminals recruited by
the French Gestapo...

Wine quickly established itself as a powerful vehicle for collaboration, promoted by Pétain and
the French state, and served from the top of Hitler's power to the whole of German society.

As soon as they were appointed by the Nazis, the "Weinführer", official delegates in the
prestigious vineyards of Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne and Cognac, took over the
production of wine. Wine was considered the "France’s most precious treasure", in the words
of Hermann Göring, showing an unquenchable thirst for the greatest French nectars.

By despoiling French vineyards to feed Nazi mundanity but also to support the war effort of
the Third Reich, the occupants diverted colossal volumes of wine, causing an unprecedented
shortage, brutal rationing and a dizzying rise in prices, at a time when wine was a vital element
of daily life.

All this is happening with the collaboration of French professionals. Eminent personalities,
directors of prestigious houses, were involved in this nation-wide "heist": Henri Leroy, owner
of Romanée-Conti in Burgundy and producer of wine spirits for the Reich's fuels, Melchior
de Polignac, owner of the House of Pommery and co-founder of the "Collaboration" group,
or Louis Eschenauer, "l'empereur des Chartrons", an intimate of the German military chiefs
in Bordeaux.

A captivating and disturbing story of wine in the dark times.

Christophe Lucand is a professor and PhD in History, and a researcher associated with the
UNESCO Chair in "Wine Culture and Traditions" at the University of Burgundy. A specialist
in the worlds of wine and vineyards, he is the author of several reference works, including Le
Vin et la guerre (Armand Colin, 2017) and Le Pinard des Poilus (Éditions Universitaires de Dijon,
2015).

33
FEMMES BOURREAUX
SS Women
Barbara Neçek
October 2022
304 pages

A fascinating historical investigation into the female guards of the Nazi concentration
and extermination camps. Femmes bourreaux traces the rise and daily life of these
women in the camps: a story that has never before been written.

“They are fantastic, frightening creatures, reminiscent of dark legends. Ruthless, they are
probably even more dangerous than the SS executioners because they are women. Are they
really women?”, Lina Haag, a survivor of the Lichtenburg camp, testified.

Their names were Irma Grese, also known as "The Auschwitz Hyena", Maria Mandl, Johanna
Langefeld and Hermine Braunsteiner, to name the most famous. In each concentration and
extermination camp where they were assigned, they embodied fear, brutality and death. These
women who actively participated in the Nazi genocide machine were camp guards. Since Nazi
law required that female prisoners and deportees be guarded by women, a special SS corps
was created for this purpose, with around 4,000 recruits.

An essential part of the administration of the camps, the guards, generally from modest
backgrounds – factory workers, domestic staff or postal carriers - were recruited through
journal advertisements, word-of-mouth or directly at their place of work.

It was at Ravensbrück, the first and largest camp for women, that they were trained from 1939.
In the concentration camp environment, they quickly became specialists in violence. In 1942,
when the camps multiplied and the "final solution" was adopted, they were sent to the East to
assist the SS in their macabre work: humiliation, torture, selection for the gas chambers. Their
cruelty had nothing to envy to that of the men.

Although after the war some of the women guards were tried and executed by the Allied forces
justice system, the majority managed to be forgotten. It took the persistence of Nazi hunters
like Simon Wiesenthal to track them down, sometimes as far away as the United States.

An essential book shedding light on this little-known chapter in the history of Nazism.

Born in Austria to Polish parents, Barbara Neçek is a journalist and historical documentary
filmmaker. Femmes bourreaux is her first book.

34
LE TEMPS DES FEMINISMES
The Time of Feminisms
Michelle Perrot and Eduardo Castillo
January 2022
260 pages

We are not born feminists, so how do we become one? Michelle Perrot, author of the
famous Histoire des femmes en Occident, and a pioneer of women's history, returns
with a remarkable new book. Both intimate and theoretical, a history book and a
personal story, Le Temps des feminisms traces the history of the French feminist
movement and sheds light on the current cleavages.

When Michel Pierrot was a little girl, her father always told her not to marry too young. She
remembers always striving to be like the others, to be no different from men. Today she looks
back on her path: from Christian activism to feminism via communism. Her intellectual
journey that starts with her doctoral thesis in which she sees retrospectively signs of almost a
masculin view of women, gives an insight into a century of societal change and the historical
depth of the struggles that are shaking our societies today.

Michelle Perrot was the first historian to teach women's history in France, in 1973. She takes
us on a feminist epic by exploring all its ramifications: the history of the fight for equality, the
history of patriarchy, the history of the feminist movement and the great debates that have
traversed and structured it: the body, gender, universalism vs. differentialism, sisterhood,
MeToo. In these pages, history is intertwined with the destiny of the women who have taken
up their cause, and we meet Artemisia Gentileschi, Olympe de Gouges, Lucie Baud, Christine
Bard, Hubertine Auclert; we dialogue with Monique Wittig, Arlette Farge, Yvette Roudy,
Antoinette Fouque...

Michelle Perrot's illuminating and scrupulous thought makes it possible to deconstruct and
even overcome the cleavages of contemporary feminism. This is an essential book by a
pioneer, a witness to a century of feminism, whose commitment is matched only by her high
standards.

Michelle Perrot is one of the most important French contemporary historians. Her
pioneering work in social history, the history of the marginalized communities, of women and
gender, has made a significant contribution to renewing the discipline. She has published
numerous works, including Histoire des femmes en Occident, with Georges Duby (Plon, 1991); Les
femmes ou les silences de l'histoire (Flammarion, 1998); Histoire de chambres (Seuil, 2009, Prix Fémina
essai); Mélancolie Ouvrière (Grasset, 2012), adapted for the cinema by Gérard Mordillat in 2017;
Le chemin des femmes (Bouquins, Laffont, 2019); La tristesse est un mur entre deux jardins. Algérie,
France, féminisme, with Wassyla Tamzali (Odile Jacob, 2021).

Eduardo Castillo is a lecturer, literary debate host, journalist and writer. He is the editor of
Chile, 11 September 1973. La démocratie assassinée (Arte / Le Serpent à plumes, 2003). In March
2013, he contributed to the collective work Pourquoi Camus.

35
LE PRESIDENT EST-IL DEVENU FOU ?
Has the President gone mad?
Patrick Weil
March 2022
480 pages

When Thomas Woodraw Wilson: a phychological study was published in 1966, co-
authored by Sigmund Freud and William Bullitt, a Philadelphia diplomate, the book
caused a scandal, and many questioned the involvement of the father of psychoanalysis
in this book devoted entirely to American president. The controversy swelled and died
down without the truth about its authors being discovered. After the death of Bullitt,
many believed the manuscript vanished. Patrick Weil has found it. An exceptional
historical document and a fruit of more of a decade of research.

To understand how this text was conceived and what role in it played Freud, we must dive
into the life of William Bullitt and follow him, step by step, through the meanderings of his
political carrier.

A close adviser of Wilson, he accompanies him through the negotiation of the Treaty of
Versailles, which was supposed, according to the President Wilson’s plan, to end all wars and
lay foundation for universal peace through the union of nations.

A few months later, to Bullitt's great surprise, Wilson deliberately and inexplicably sabotages
the ratification of the treaty. How can a head of state destroy what he has fought for? Is the
cause of this astonishing reversal to be found in the President's own head, his unconscious,
his psychic mechanisms? Had the President gone mad? Bullitt discusses this with Freud. It is
in Vienna, in 1930, that their project to write a psychological portrait of the American president
is born.

Thanks to Bullitt and Freud, we discover another reality of the Treaty of Versailles, a new
account of the period 1936-1940 that preceded the collapse of Europe. And we finally tear
away the curtain that obscures our view of an often mythologised past. Ninety years after the
completion of their joint book, Bullitt's and Freud's call to recognise the symptoms of a
pathological personality in our leaders before they lead us to disaster resounds with all its
force...

The book is published simultaneously in the USA, by W.W. Norton & Company.

Patrick Weil is director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
He is the author of several reference works, including La France et ses étrangers (Calmann-Lévy)
and, published by Grasset, Qu'est-ce qu'un Français?, Le sens de la République and De la laïcité en
France.

Rights sold for previous titles: English (Duke UP), Bulgarian (European Idea cultural),
Japanese (Akashi Shoten)

36
LA RELIGION WOKE
The Woke Religion
Jean-François Braunstein
September 2022
288 pages

Longlisted for Prix Femina essai

With La Réligion woke , philosopher Jean-François Braunstein signs an explosive essay against the
“wokisme”. Imported from American universities, this ideology which professes truths related to
gender theory, critical race theory, or intersectional theory, is spreading perniciously within
Western societies, choking freedom of expression everywhere on its path. A shocking and salutary
essay.

A wave of madness and intolerance inundated the Western world. Coming from American universities, the
woke religion is sweeping everything in its path: universities, schools, businesses, media and culture.

In the name of the fight against discrimination, it teaches truths that are, to say the least, unheard of. ‘Gender
theory’ professes that sex and body do not exist and that only consciousness matters. The 'critical race
theory' asserts that all whites are racist but that no person of a racial minority is. ‘Perspective feminism’
maintains that all knowledge is relative and that no science is objective, not even the hard sciences.

The aim of the wokes is to 'deconstruct' the entire cultural and scientific heritage of a certain West accused
of being 'systemically' sexist, racist and colonialist. These beliefs are daunting for our societies, ruled by
hyperconnected university elites.

The enthusiasm that drives the wokes is much more reminiscent of the American Protestant 'revivals' than
the French philosophy of the 1970s. This is the first time in history that religion is born within universities.
And many academics, seduced by the absurdity of these beliefs, reject the reason and tolerance that is at the
heart of their profession and the ideals of the Enlightenment. Everything is in place for a dictatorship in the
name of "good" and "social justice". It will take courage to stand against this Orwellian world that is
promised to us!

As in La philosophie devenue folle (2018), Braunstein works with texts, academic theses, lectures, and essays,
which he cites and explains at length, in order to denounce this new and dangerous for our freedom religion.

Jean-François Braunstein is a professor of contemporary philosophy at La Sorbonne. He teaches the

History of sciences and Philosophy of medicine, as well as Medical ethics. He is the author of Canguilhem,
histoire des sciences et politique du vivant; L’histoire des sciences. Méthodes, styles et controverses and La philosophie de la
médecine d’Auguste Comte. Vierge Mère, vaches folles et morts vivants (PUF); and La philosophie devenue folle (Grasset,
2018).

Rights sold for La philosophie devenue folle : Spanish (Planeta), Czech (CDK), Turkish (Raskolnikov
Kitap).
37
LE SACRE DES PANTOUFLES
The Rise of the Slippers: On the Withdrawal from the World
Pascal Bruckner
September 2022
162 pages

In this brilliant and entertaining essay, from the author of Une brève éternité (33,000 copies
sold in France in a trade format, translated into seven languages), Pascal Bruckner analyses
the dangerous tendency of withdrawing oneself from the world in the beginning of this XXI
century, already marked by declinism and catastrophism. It is no longer health tyranny that
threatens us but sedentary tyranny: will the slipper and the dressing gown be the new symbols
of tomorrow's world?

Since the beginning of the century, events such as global warming, Islamic terrorism and, more recently,
the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, have led to widespread alarmism. In response to this situation,
the doxa says that the only reasonable recourse is to return to one’s home, the last refuge and protection
against savagery. But the home these days is not just a shelter, it is much more: a space in itself that
supplants and replaces the world, a connected cocoon that gradually renders any breakthrough to the
outside superfluous.

From our couch, we can enjoy remotely the pleasures once offered by the cinema, the theatre and the
cafés. Almost everything can be delivered to our homes, including love. So why go out and expose
yourself? Like the Russian literary hero Oblomov, who lived in bed and never managed to leave his
house to face life, are we too going to become impaired, huddled and lifeless beings?

The ambition of this essay is to describe the archaeology of this new mentality of withdrawal and
renunciation, to grasp its philosophical roots and historical contours. For never has the tension
between the desire to wander and the taste for reclusion been so strong. And compulsory confinement,
the nightmare of the past few years, seems to have been replaced for many by voluntary self-
confinement. Fleeing from the cities, working remotely, condemning travel and tourism, we risk
becoming burrowing creatures that cower at the slightest tremor.

Philosopher and novelist, Pascal Bruckner is the author of a body of work comprising some thirty
titles, for which he has received numerous awards (Medicis Prize for essays, Montaigne Prize, Renaudot
Prize), his works were adapted to screen and translated to multiple languages. His latest titles include
Une brève éternité, philosophie de la longévité (2019), Un coupable presque parfait, la construction du bouc-émissaire
blanc (2020) and Dans l'amitié d'une montagne: petit traité d'élévation (2022).

Rights sold for previous titles: German (Siedler Verlag, Aufbau, Tiamat), English (US: Princeton UP, Harvard
UP, Algora | UK: Polity Press, The 87 Press, Dedalus), Arabic (Ceres, Obeikan), Bosnian (Buybook), Bulgarian
(Liubomadrie, Gloria Mundie), Chinese (Haitian, East China Normal, SDX Joint, Athena), Korean (Influential,
Next Wave, Munhakdongne, Dongmoonsun, Jakkajungsin, Vega Books, Mujintree), Croatian (Algoritam,
DHK), Spanish (Siruela, Impedimenta, Tusquets, Ariel, PPM), Greek (Patakis), Hungarian (Szazadveg
Foundation, Europa Konyvkiado), Italian (Ugo Guanda, Ipermedium Libri, Garzanti), Japanese (Hosei
UP, Kanki), Lithuanian (Tyto Alba), Dutch (Standaard, Boom, De Bezige Bij), Norvegian (Arneberg,
Vidarflaget), Polish (Panstwowy Instytut, Jagiellonian UP), Portugueuse (Brazil : Editora Bertrand, Rocco
Editora | Portugal : Gravida, Europa America, Medialivros, Noticias), Romanian (Trei, Nemira), Russian
(Ivan Limbakh, Text), Serbian (Sluzbeni Glasnik, Beobook), Slovak (Kalligram), Slovenian (Beletrina AP,
Zalobza), Czech (Motto, Mlada Fronta, Pulchra), Turkish (Sel), Ukrainian (Ecem Media, Grani).
38
DANS L’AMITIE D’UNE MONTAGNE
In the Presence of a Mountain
Pascal Bruckner

January 2022
192 pages

We know the ardent defender of democratic values through his essays, his taste for
the philosophical exploitation of limits through his novels. We know that Pascal Bruckner is
also a great connoisseur of the mountains. Why are mountains so fascinating? Once feared,
seen as hideous stone warts, mountains have been considered since Rousseau as a place of
relief and serenity, as opposed to rogue cities. The attraction they arouse has not waned
since.

But why climb to the top if it is only to come back down, why does the suffering of climbing become
pleasure, why does the absurdity of this practice make the absurdity of existence seem trivial,
what metaphysics of the absolute is at stake here, what challenge to time, to ageing, to panic fear,
to the danger brushed aside in order to be better averted?

A child of snow and fir trees, raised in Austria and Switzerland, Pascal Bruckner has a
special relationship with his subject: the higher he climbs, the more he reconnects with his youth. So
that this essay on the mountains begins as a form of sensitive autobiography, a book of
confidences and confessions in which all the senses contribute to the recollection of the past: for
him, climbing means rejuvenating his spirit, reconnecting the two parts of his life in a single loop.

In a shimmering and sensual style, this essay-narrative melts into one snowy mass of things seen and
read, literature and philosophy, the rituals of a passionate practice and questions about the meaning
of life, the destruction of our ecosystem, the twilight of a form of adventure threatened like an
endangered masterpiece. Does the rush to the top tell in its own way the end of a world?

A brief and necessary treatise on elevation in our time of confinement and slouching: in
the contemporary feeling of suffocation, this escape to the summits brings us a beauty of landscapes
and a reassuring height of view.

Novelist and essayist, Pascal Bruckner is the author of forty titles, for which he has
received numerous awards (Medicis Prize for essays, Montaigne Prize, Renaudot Prize), his works
have been translated in numerous languages. His latest titles include: Une brève éternité, philosophie de la
longévité (2019), Un coupable presque parfait, la construction du bouc-émissaire blanc (2020).

Rights sold: Italian (Ugo Guanda), Korean (Wisemap), Spanish world right (Siruela), Romanian
(Trei)

Rights sold for previous titles: German (Siedler Verlag, Aufbau, Tiamat), English (US: Princeton UP,
Harvard UP, Algora | UK: Polity Press, The 87 Press, Dedalus), Arab (Ceres, Obeikan), Bosniac (Buybook),
Bulgarian (Liubomadrie, Gloria Mundie), Chinese (Haitian, East China Normal, SDX Joint, Athena), Korean
(Influential, Next Wave, Munhakdongne, Dongmoonsun, Jakkajungsin, Vega Books, Mujintree), Croatian
(Algoritam, DHK), Spanish (Siruela, Impedimenta, Tusquets, Ariel, PPM), Greek (Patakis), Hungarian
(Szazadveg Foundation, Europa Konyvkiado), Italian (Ugo Guanda, Ipermedium Libri, Garzanti),
Japanese (Hosei UP, Kanki), Lithuanian (Tyto Alba), Dutch (Standaard, Boom, De Bezige Bij), Norvegian
(Arneberg, Vidarflaget), Polish (Panstwowy Instytut, Jagiellonian UP), Portuguese (Brazill : Editora
Bertrand, Rocco Editora | Portugal : Gravida, Europa America, Medialivros, Noticias), Romanian (Trei,
Nemira), Russian (Ivan Limbakh, Text), Serbian (Sluzbeni Glasnik, Beobook), Slovak (Kalligram), Slovenian
(Beletrina AP, Zalobza), Czech (Motto, Mlada Fronta, Pulchra), Turkish (Sel), Ukrainian (Ecem Media, Grani)
39
ACHEVER CLAUSEWITZ
Completing Clausewitz
René Girard & Benoît Chantre
New and augmented edition

November 2022
496 pages

When René Girard and Benoît Chantre decided in the spring of 2006 to write a book on the
polemicist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), the prospect of a nuclear catastrophe had faded
from view. The Cold War seemed over. And 'old Europe' pretended to think it had exorcised
its age-old conflicts. We have now entered a new era of violence in which the possibility of
'absolute war' looms much larger than in the 1960s and 1970s. These rich and detailed
interviews have unfortunately not lost their relevance.

Published in October 2007, Achever Clausewitz was very well received and translated into many
languages: a success that was not guaranteed a priori by the violence of its content. Deliberately
apocalyptic, these interviews on the destruction of Europe, the failure of historical Christianity and the
twilight of the West ended with a pledge for the Franco-German relationship and the figures who
embodied it. However, no one expected an author who was thought to be more concerned with the
origins of humanity than with the end of Western history to be involved in the geopolitical field.

The interest that this book continues to arouse, fifteen years after its publication, in military and
strategic circles as well as among literary scholars, philosophers and anthropologists, provides an
opportunity for publishing a revised and expanded version. But the context has changed considerably.
In 2007, it was the suicidal acts of the Jihad that Girard and Chantre were questioning in their rereading
of De la guerre. The invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops in February 2022, while following the
breach opened by 9/11, foreshadows a conflict on a scale not seen since 1945.

The definitive edition of a book-summary, indispensable today, revised by Benoît Chantre and
completed by an unpublished letter from René Girard.

René Girard (1923-2015) was a member of the Académie Française and Professor Emeritus at
Stanford University. A literary theorist and anthropologist, he is the author of numerous essays
translated worldwide and published, for the most part, by Éditions Grasset: Mensonge romantique et vérité
romanesque (1961); La Violence et le sacré (1972); Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (1978); Le Bouc
émissaire (1982); La Route antique des hommes pervers (1985); Je vois Satan tomber comme l'éclair (1999).

Benoît Chantre is editor and president of the Association Recherches Mimétiques, of which René
Girard was honorary president.

Rights sold: Coréen (Hangilsa)

Rights sold for previous titles: German (Patmos, Gerder, Kultur Verlag), English (Orbis, Athlone,
The John Hopkin University Press), Arabic (Arab org. for translation, Arab center for research),
Spanish (Sigueme, Anagrama), Catalan (Fragmenta), Chinese (Pekin UP, Chongqing, Nenan UP,
Nanjing UP, Shanghai People’s publishing, Cogito, Faces Publications, SDX Joint), Korean (Minumsa),
Danish (Aros), Finnish (Tutkijaliitoo), Japanese (Hakusui Sha, Hosei UP), Hebrew (Nymrod Books),
Hungarian (Harmattan, Gondolat, Atlantisz), Italian (Giunti, Adelphi, Bompiani), Georgian (Ilia State
UP), Greek (Plethron, Indiktos), Dutch (Noordboek), Norvegian (Teori Og Praksis), Serbian (Factum),
Swedish (Daidalos), Swahili (Creative Stars Print Media), Polish (Nomos), Portuguese (Portugal:
Almedina, Universidade de Lisboa / Brazil: Paz e terra, Pia Socieddade de Sao Paulo, E realizaçoes),
Turkish (Monokl, Metis Yayincilik, Kanat Kitap, Alfa Basim), Romanian (Cartea Romanesca,
Humanitas, Nemira), Russian (Ivan Limbakh, NLO, St Andrew’s Biblical)
40
PASCAL ET LA PROPOSITION CHRETIENNE
Blaise Pascal and the Christian Proposal
Pierre Manent
October 2022
432 pages

While removed to the margins of European life, Christianity still lies at its heart. We
are ruled by what we are trying to escape. How can we grasp the unity and life, the
meaning and urgency of this question of God? By studying Pascal's thought in this
masterly essay, Pierre Manent attempts to find the exact terms, and to re-establish the
gravity and urgency of the Christian question.

It was in the middle of the 17th century that the decision was taken to build the sovereign
state. And it was at this point that Blaise Pascal reconsidered what Pierre Manent calls “the
Christian proposal”, that is the whole of the Christian dogmas and mysteries offered to the
consideration of our understanding and the consent of our will. "Proposal" here has not only
a logical or notional meaning, but a practical and active one: it is an act of is God in his Church.

On the fourth centenary of Blaise Pascal's birth, one of France's greatest philosophers takes
on the task of rediscovering the foundations of the Christian faith in order to bring it into the
present day, with the help and guidance of the works of one of the most important thinkers
in Western history.

Pierre Manent was Head of research at the EHESS. A founding member of the journal
Commentaire, he has published numerous works, including: Tocqueville et la nature de la démocratie
(1993), La Cité de l'homme (1994); La Raison des nations (2006); Les Métamorphoses de la cité (2010);
Montaigne. La vie sans loi (2014); Situation de la France (2015) or La loi naturelle et les droits de l'homme
(2020).

41
L’ODYSSEE DES FOURMIS
The Odyssey of the Ants
Audrey Dussutour, Antoine Wystrach
April 2022
448 pages

Two leading myrmecologists (ant experts) introduce us to the daily lives of these
remarkable insects, about which we know comparatively little and whose social
structures are at least as complex as our own, if not more so. A scientific odyssey that
is full of surprises and reads like an adventure novel!

Scientists have catalogued 13,000 species of ant and estimate that there are some 25,000 in
total. These insects, which appeared on our planet 170 million years ago, have colonised every
continent with the exception of Antarctica. The great conquerors of history turn out not to be
Napoleon or Genghis Khan but ants, and their sheer diversity is impressive.

Drawing on their travels around the globe, Audrey Dussutour and Antoine Wistrach describe
in detail one of the key activities of ants: the search for food. This task can occupy millions of
individuals within a single colony, and to achieve their goal they are capable of undertaking
journeys of several dozen kilometres, often in very hostile terrain. Their route is strewn with
obstacles, as well as predators that they may have to fend off at any moment. Indeed, you
could be forgiven for thinking that the art of warfare was invented by ants, so diverse is the
range of weapons and tactics to which they resort.

They are also blessed with incredible memories, a gift for strategy and Herculean physical
strength, and a description of their daily lives reads like the most thrilling of adventure novels!
And then of course there is their social structure, with its swimmers, weightlifters, doctors,
farmers, drug users, suicide attackers, fliers, gliders, slaves and many other social categories
besides.

Audrey Dussutour is a renowned myrmecologist who is known in particular for her cutting-
edge research into single-celled organisms.

Antoine Wystrach is also a myrmecologist and neuroethologist whose specialist field is insect
behaviour. He has studied ant navigation both in the laboratory and in the field using
sophisticated tools such as virtual reality, 3D computer graphics and neuron network models.

Rights sold: Japanese (under offer)

42
MILLE ET UN BEBES
A Thousand and One Baby
François Olivennes
October 2022
144 pages

With over thirty years of experience, Professor François Olivennes, an internationally

renowned obstetrician and gynaecologist, a specialist in medically assisted
procreation (MAP), shares with us in Mille et un bébés the most striking memories of
his extraordinary career. In the form of short chapters that are both instructive and
funny, and that read like incredible but true short stories, he approaches a subject ever
so complex: the desire for a child.

Every day, Professor François Olivennes gives hope to infertile women and couples. Even
more so, he offers them a chance to become parents. Among his patients, some have
particularly touched him, by their originality, their obstinacy, their incredible requests... This
book relates some of the most memorable situations he has had to deal with: a famous
American actress asking him to treat her in the greatest secrecy; or this mother-in-law who
comes to bribe him so that the first of her sons donates his sperm instead of the second -
without him knowing it; or this couple, she in her forties and he almost twice as old, who come
to assess their chances of having a child...

It is also often a question of distress and urgency in Professor Olivennes' practice: after the
age of 37, women's fertility drops rapidly, and more and more men are having fertility
problems... There are also the refusals that the doctor has to oppose to improbable demands
that infringe the law or the child's well-being. And, of course, the ethical questions he faces in
connection with disability, precariousness or sexual orientation of certain patients: who should
be helped, and in the name of what would one renounce to do so?

But above all, this book speaks of the strength of the "desire for a child" and, in the midst of
sometimes painful trajectories, the beauty, the comical nature and the joy of the profession.
Indeed, if the failures and certain tragedies mark it deeply, what could be more joyous and
rewarding for a practitioner than to announce to one of his patients that she is finally
pregnant?

François Olivennes is an obstetrician gynecologist and specialist in medically assisted

reproduction. He is the author of Pour la PMA (JC Lattès, 2018), Faire un enfant au XXIe siècle
(Flammarion, 2013) and N'attendez pas trop longtemps pour faire un enfant (Odile Jacob, 2008).

43
LES NOUVELLES ROUTES DE NOTRE
SERVITUDE
The New Routes of Our Servitude
Thierry Wolton
November 2022
216 pages

The Internet, social networks and the multitude of applications available have radically
changed our relationship with reality. Much has been said and written about this new
world, either to marvel at it or to worry about it. This essay proposes a different
approach: the aim is not to condemn the digital revolution we are experiencing, but to
question the increasing of control that these new technologies are imposing on our
lives, in all its aspects and often without our knowledge. A powerful, incisive and clear
essay on the surrender of freedom that modern man has consented to technologies
that control his life.

A mirror of our self-centeredness and a refuge for communitarism adepts, the internet
nourishes social fractures while promoting a normalising conformism under the constraint of
minorities galvanised by the algorithms that convince them to embody the new doxa.

Initially an instrument of knowledge, the internet has become a tool of surveillance and
control, with totalitarian values, norms, mindset, and practice taking the ever-increasing place
in it. Since even what seems to be a recourse to dependence on Big Tech, i.e. the assumption
of responsibility by the public authorities, is a major risk for our freedom, as shown by the
Chinese trend addressed in details in the book.

These are the new routes of voluntary servitude that the author unveils here in three parts:
alienation, normalisation and submission. Because freedom is the most precious asset,
especially for those who are deprived of it, this book is advocating for its defense and
restoration.

As Victor Hugo said, "Let's save the freedom, it will take care of the rest".

Journalist and essayist, Thierry Wolton is the author of a monumental three-volume World
History of Communism (2015-2017), which won the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the
Aujourd'hui Prize and the Hope Prize of the Timisoara Memorial in Romania.

Rights sold for previous titles: Japanese (Jiji Press), Polish (Literackie Wydawnictwo),
Romanian (Humanitas), Russian (Centrepolygraph Traders)

44
LE GRAND TOUR
The Grand Tour
Collective work
Edited and prefaced by Olivier Guez

March 2022
464 pages

On the occasion of the presidency of France in the European Union, twenty-seven

writers – one for each member-state – describe key moments in European culture and
history. These previously unpublished essays and short stories bring together
memories, landscapes, and collective imagery of what constitutes today’s Europe. An
immersive journey into the European imagination, an unprecedented panorama of
contemporary European literature, and a self-portrait of the continent by its best
writers.

The contributors of the anthology are: Daniel Kehlmann (Germany), Eva Menasse (Austria),
Lize Spitz (Belgium), Kapka Kassabova (Bulgaria), Stavros Christodoulou (Cyprus), Olja
Savicevic (Croatia), Jens Christian Grondahl (Denmark), Fernando Aramburu (Spain), Tiit
Aleksjev (Estonia), Sofi Oksanen (Finland), Maylis de Kerangal (France), Ersi Sotiropoulos
(Greece), Laszlo Krasznahorkai (Hungary), Colm Toibin (Ireland), Rosella Postorino (Italy),
Janis Jonevs (Latvia), Tomas Venclova (Lithuania), Jean Portante (Luxembourg), Imannuel
Mifsud (Malta), Jan Brokken (Netherlands), Agata Tuczynska (Poland), Lidia Jorge (Portugal),
Norman Manea (Romania), Michal Hvorecky (Slovakia), Brina Svit (Slovenia), Björn Larsson
(Sweden), et Katerina Tuckova (Czech republic).

Edited and prefaced by Olivier Guez, Le Grand tour is the only book to have obtained the
official label of the Presidency of France in the EU.

Olivier Guez is the author, among others, of La Disparition de Josef Mengele (Grasset, 2017, Prix
Renaudot) and, more recently, Une passion absurde et décevante, Ecrits sur le football (L'Observatoire,
2021).

Rights sold: Dutch (under offer)

45
LES LOUPS AIMENT LA BRUME
Wolves Roam In The Fog
Laure Marchand and Guillaume Perrier
September 2022
288 pages

An exceptional political investigation by the journalists Laure Marchand and Guillaume Perrier
into the surveillance network orchestrated by the Turkish government in Europe. From Sicily to
Vienna, from Brussels to Berlin, from Amsterdam to Zurich, they followed the traces, interviewed
witnesses, and studied the archives and judicial files. What resulted is an unprecedented and
rigorously documented account of the President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s illegal spy activity on the
European territory: assassination orders against European politicians, perpetrations of Kurdish-
European activists, an expanded network of intelligence operatives acting through clubs,
embassies, and mosques.

Since the failure of Turkey's negotiations with the European Union regarding its membership, Ankara and
Brussels have had a more than ambiguous relationship. Alternating diplomatic crises and geopolitical
collaborations, two visions of the world are pitted against each other: democratic and cosmopolitan Europe
versus Erdogan's nationalist and autocratic Turkey. But it is in the shadow of the media scene, in the
underground activism of Turkey and its clandestine cells that the real threat lurks.

As a Turkish proverb says, "wolves roam in the fog", and when the fog lifts, it leaves behind only questions
and corpses. It is to penetrate the opacity that surrounds this agents network and the activities of the Turkish
intelligence services - the dreaded MIT - that the authors have conducted their investigation.
It all begins in Sicily, where they meet a former spy who had been recruited to assassinate an Austrian
politician. Gradually, the puzzle takes shape. In Germany, dissidents forced to live under police protection
talk. In Switzerland, a political opposant escaped a kidnapping orchestrated by Turkish diplomats. In France,
they obtain unprecedented revelations about the 2013 murder of three Kurdish activists, a case still
unsolved, and about the authorities' reluctance to solve the enigma.

In the course of their research, the entire European territory appears to be a privileged and violent field of
action for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's strategy of international expansion. In the European diaspora,
'Reis' can count on its militants, Islamist and ultranationalist networks, the "Grey Wolves" and politico-
criminal groups ready to go to the front to defend the motherland. But with the weakening of Turkish
government and the upcoming succession crisis, the wolves are devouring each other. Which makes them
potentially even more dangerous for European democracies.

Laure Marchand is a journalist. For more than 10 years she has been a Turkey correspondent for several
French-speaking media. She is the author of Triple assassinat au 147 rue La Fayette (Actes Sud), selected for
the 2017 Albert-London Prize.

Guillaume Perrier is a correspondent of the international bureau of Le Point. He is the author and director
of Turkey-ISI: dangerous liaisons, produced by ARTE and selected for the FIGRA and DIG Awards (Italy), as
well as a documentary film Erdogan, l'ivresse du pouvoir, broadcasted by ARTE in France and in more than 20
other countries, and selected for the Prix EUROPA for documentary films, as well as FIGRA.

46
CAUCHEMAR BRESILIEN
The Brazilian Nightmare
Bruno Meyerfeld
September 2022
368 pages

A land of contradictions, Colossus on clay feet, Brazil is a discreet country-continent,

which however is not immune to contemporary societal ills such as populism. A Franco-
Brazilian journalist, Bruno Meyerfeld retraces the story of its current president Jair
Bolsonaro, from his childhood to his rise to power. An encounter with a fascinating
personality hated as much as he is adored, and whose term was tragically marked by the
pandemic.

Elected in 2018 after a violent campaign marked by the rejection by the elites and a tentative of
assassination, Jair Bolsonaro (surnamed “Trump of the tropics”), is the first far-right president to
settle in Brasilia. How did it happen that in such a multicultural country like Brazil, a majority has
voted for a man who worships military dictatorship, loudly proclaims his ignorance of public and
economic affairs, openly insults homosexuals and black people, and despises women, institutions,
ecology, and nature?

From the COVID-19 pandemic, which claimed more than 600 000 victims in Brazil, to Amazon
rainforest wildfires and several attempts of coup d’état, never in modern history has a major
democracy brought such a person to power. In four years of a furious and grotesque mandate, Jair
Bolsonaro has been the man of all excesses, of all transgressions. In comparison, politicians like
Victor Orban, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Eric Zemmour, or Matteo Salvini seem like simple
nationalists.

But who is Jair Bolsonaro? A triumphant clown manipulated by the army or an autocrat who
decimated his own people? And what does his story tell us about Brazil, our time, the state of the
media, and democracy?

Bruno Meyerfeld follows the major events of Bolsonaro’s mandate, as well as the itinerary of this
fascinating figure. He reveals the everyday life of the insomniac and paranoic president at the
Aurora Palace, the residence of Brazilian heads of state. A dive into the madness of power et a
discovery of an extraordinary country.

Bruno Meyerfeld is a Franco-Brazilian journalist and correspondent of Le Monde in Brazil.

47
TECHNOFEMINISM
How Digital Technology Is Increasing Inequalities
Mathilde Saliou
February 2023
320 pages

The digital world shapes our lives, yet it has a problem with diversity. Journalist
Mathilde Saliou's unique investigation analyses the roots of online hatred, reveals the
sexism and discrimination of the Internet industry, proposes a counter-history of the
digital world, and methodically dissects the origins and tangible effects of this
marginalisation on our societies.

“Rule n° 30: there are no girls on the internet”. This statement, which has been circulating on
some forums since the early 2000s, illustrates how women are received online. The world wide
web is home to a number of masculinist communities, which the digital giants have allowed
to gather under the guise of promoting freedom of expression. Their adepts, who sometimes
call themselves "involuntary celibates", are multiplying violent actions and making more and
more victims - harassment, disclosure of personal information or intimate images, sometimes
even murder. Their discriminatory ideas turn them into relays for the extreme right-wing
groups that are flourishing around the world.

The book traces the journey of the author of the first computer program, Ada Lovelace, a
brilliant mathematician and daughter of Lord Byron. It tells the story of Hedy Lamarr, a
Hollywood star, who spent more time inventing all sorts of objects than acting on camera. Or
Katherine Johnson, whose talent pushed back the limits imposed by segregation within NASA.
On its pages we meet researchers and activists who are working to evolve our digital worlds
as they expand, from the first connected spaces to the field of artificial intelligence.

In this original essay-investigation, Mathilde Saliou exposes the underside of a world largely
made by and for men: the discriminatory effects of the algorithms on our society, the biased
financing of tech by the predominantly male venture capitalists, the way in which the consent
of each individual is constantly forced by the giants of the Net in order to profit from our
data... Interviewing academics, programmers, activists and precursors, she also identifies ways
of resistance to the discriminatory architecture of the digital world, ways of taking power in
order to design technofeminist futures.

Mathilde Saliou was born in 1992. She is a journalist specialised in digital media and a
graduate from the Paris School of Political Science (Sciences Po). She has worked for
numerous medias, such as RFI, 20 Minutes, Slate, Usbek & Rica, Les Inrocks, Numerama,
Flint, etc. From 2020 to 2022, she was engaged with Prenons la Une, an association that fights
for a better representation of women in the media and for equality in editorial offices.
Technofeminism is her first book.

48
PROUST OCEAN
Proust Ocean
Charles Dantzig

September 2022
336 pages

Marcel Proust is the most celebrated French writer in the world. Who would have bet on it during
his lifetime, and even decades after his death? His way to posterity was slow and difficult. Now
that he has triumphed, it is hard to imagine that, except from a very small number of people, he
was despised during his lifetime. When he obtained the Goncourt prize at the end of his life, the
press taunted him. That is what Proust Ocean draws upon, but what it mostly talks about
is literature.
In Search of Lost Time is a book which had no previous example in French literature. Beyond his admirable
reflection on love, jealousy, desire, Proust brings forward a great number of new subjects thus far
not touched upon, for instance snobbism, homosexuality, judeity from a non-picturesque point of
view, the tenderness in men, the novelist as a character of the novel. On the other hand, and above all,
it is a book which has invented an unequaled manner of writing. Proust Ocean is the first book to show the
prodigious stylistic contribution of In Search of Lost Time. The French language, so regulated, so logical, so
often dry, was made unbelievably more flexible by Marcel Proust. Proust’s language is supple and
encompassing like the sea. Not only does he use a prodigious number of aquatic comparisons, but the
rhythm of the sentences in themselves, sinuous, enveloping, creates a unique sensation of totality.
With all of that, In Search of Lost Time is not a difficult book to read, which is one of the main point which
Proust Ocean draws upon. Proust Ocean finally attempts to imagine what the future destiny of this great
writer would be like. What is Proust in the world of Trump?
In Proust Ocean, Charles Dantzig contributes of unique relation to writers, made of an
extraordinary knowledge and an incomparable intimacy coming from the fact that he is himself a writer.
The originality of his points of view, his own style, as penetrating as lively, makes of Proust Ocean a moment
in the literature on writers.

Novelist, poet, editor, radio producer, Charles Dantzig is the author of Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature
française and Encyclopédie capricieuse du tout et du rien as well as Pourquoi lire ? (all published by Grasset). In
addition to having already written on Proust in his Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature française and directed
Le Grand Livre de Proust (Les Belles Lettres), he is also the curator of the “Proust Year” on the public
radio channel France Culture.

“With his characteristic blend of literary acuity, humanistic insight, and intellectual insouciance, Charles Dantzig delivers, with Proust Océan, a reading
of the great Master not quite like any others we have seen during this centenary year. The title of Dantzig’s latest indispensable deep-dive into French
literature will immediately recall, to the dévoté of Proust, the opening of The Guermantes Way, with its famous comparison of aristocrats in their boxes
at the Paris Opéra to Nereids and other sea-creatures: but Dantzig’s book is much larger, and his achievement in this new study is to expand the
seagoing metaphor to include the entire novel. In Proust Océan, Charles Dantzig shows how apt the oceanic metaphor is, charting the manifold ways in
which A la recherche as a whole functions precisely in the way that the Greeks thought “Ocean” functioned, which is to say as a grand encircling stream
which encloses the entire world and all human activity: in this case, from Proust’s own time to the present, from André Gide to Lucian Freud—to name
just two of the creators and artists whose work, Dantzig makes clear, truly “flows” from the vast ocean created by Proust. Of all the books that have
floated to the surface during this 100th anniversary of Proust’s death, this is the most original and by far the most vital to read.”
- David Mendelsohn

49
TRUE POET
Harold Pinter. An Intimate Memoir
Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni
2024
250 pages

An intimate biography of the Novel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, and an

enthralling portrait of the late 1970s England, from the Pinter’s stepdaughter Natasha
Fraser.

True Poet unveils the relationship between Harold Pinter and his stepdaughter Natasha Fraser.
The memoir covers a poignant decade in England, from 1975 to 1985, when Pinter was at his
creative zenith, writing plays for the brand-new National Theatre, directing hits on Broadway
and writing Hollywood screenplays.

True Poet begins when Natasha Fraser is 11 years old and her mother, the bestselling historian
Antonia Fraser has fallen madly in love with Pinter, an angry young man of the theater. Her
decision to run off with him caused a huge scandal in class-conscious British society. She was a
catholic blue-blood mother of six, married to a Conservative member of parliament and he was
the equally married Jewish-born son of an East End Tailor. Many wagged their fingers and
predicted that the romance wouldn’t last but it did until Pinter’s death in 2008.

True Poet shows the gentle and inclusive side of Harold Pinter, both feared and criticized for
being an enigmatic genius. An almost fairytale-like rapport evolves between him and Natasha
Fraser, the cuckoo in her mother’s nest, who is smitten by his world of famous playwrights,
film stars and top restaurants. The memoir is set against an energetic, carefree and innocent
time in England when money mattered less, and politicians were trustworthy.

Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni is a British writer and journalist based in Paris. Her fifteen books
include Sam Spiegel, Monsieur Dior, Loulou de la Falaise and her first memoir, After Andy, Adventures in
Warhol Land. As well as writing for Egoïste, Les Echos and Cabana, Fraser frequently
lectures at the V&A museum, has taught at the American University in Paris and is producing
her second documentary for the BBC.

50
PETIT TRAITE DU RACISME EN AMERIQUE
A Short Commentary on Racism in America
Dany Laferrière
January 2023
256 pages

In this book, the first that Dany Laferriere devotes to racism, he focuses on what is
perhaps the most important racism in the Western world, the one that is consuming
the United States: the black Americans. 43 million people descending from those who
were exploited and martyrized. 43 million people who are still often subjected to
racism. A nuanced, moving and invigorating essay.

Far from organising a Manichean opposition between black and white, Dany Laferrière
specifies: "We must understand that the word black does not contain all blacks, just as the
word white does not contain all whites. It is only with nuance that we can move forward on
such a minefield.”

Brief reflections on contempt, rage and the Ku Klux Klan alternate with short chapters on
artists, great figures, black or white, who acted in black or white: Charles Lynch, the inventor
of lynching, but also Eleanor Roosevelt; and Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Beecher Stowe,
the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Bessie Smith, to whom the book is dedicated, and
Angela Davis.

This Short commentary of racism in America ends on a note of hope, one that Dany Laferrière
confides to women: "Toni, Maya, Billie, Nina, come on girls, the world is yours!”

Dany Laferrière was born in Porte-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1953. The winner of the Prix Médicis
in 2009 for L’Enigme du retour (Grasset), he became member of the French Academy in
2013. With Grasset he published Je suis un écrivain japonais (2008), L’Art presque perdu de ne
rien faire (2014), and L'Enfant qui regarde (2022).

Rights sold: German (Das Wunderhorn)

51
LE RETOURNEMENT
The Reversal
Manuel Carcassonne
January 2022
250 pages

Le Retournement is a highly original autobiographical text that seems to borrow from

both autofiction and the current political issues of identity, gender, race and
religion. Part family archaeology and part historical genealogy, in this book Manuel
Carcassonne – a renowned French publisher – undertakes a genuine existential
exploration.

Manuel Carcassonne is a descendant of Alsatian Jews on his mother's side and of the Judeo-
Provençal community of the Jews of the Pope on his father's. His wife, Diane, is an Arab from
Achrafieh, Lebanon, of Greek-Catholic, Melkite origin, born in Boulogne, France. A
persecuted minority on one side, a schismatic and persecuted minority on the other... They
share the aristocracy of the oppressed, who have turned persecution into distinction, but have to
deal with cultural universes so different that everything is a subject to dispute, source of an
often-comical love story...

With great erudition and a constant anxiety mixed with irony, this story, written in a remarkable
style, is the most marvellous rebuttal that one can imagine to the univocal identity assignment
that characterizes our modern times: How can an ashamed former Jew return to his Judaism by
the love encounter with his inverted double?

Editor and literary critic, Manuel Carcassonne has spent most of his career at Editions
Grasset, where he was literary director, then deputy general manager, before taking over the
Editions Stock in 2013. He is also the director of the collective work Gombrowicz, vingt ans après
(Christian Bourgois, 1989) and the preface of Contre les poètes de Gombrowicz (Editions Complexe,
1988, 1999). The Reversal is his first book.

Rights sold: Hebrew (under offer)

52
MAÎTRESSE DE CEREMONIES
The Hostess
Françoise Dumas
October 2022
240 pages

You don't know Françoise Dumas? It's normal, discretion is her line of conduct.
However, for the last fifty years, she has been pulling the strings of the most beautiful
parties in France. In Maîtresse de cérémonies , she finally reveals her work, which is as
little known as it is fascinating. She goes back over her personal journey, from
anecdotes to meetings with the great and the good of this world. An autobiography
full of advice on how to excel in the art of French entertaining!

1950s, Paris. Françoise Dumas, then a young woman, joins the PR team of Georges Cravenne,
the inventor of the Césars film ceremony, and learns a brand-new trade. A talented apprentice,
she quickly excels in the art of hosting exquisite events and few years later creates her own
agency specialised in the organisation of receptions that will become known throughout the
world. This work is not about celebrity, far from it, it is about the art of living, and not any art of
living, but the French one: the art-de-vivre à la française!

Alongside Françoise Dumas, who owes much to the last great mistresses of the house, Marie-
Hélène de Rothschild and Ira de Fürstenberg, we learn the little and big secrets of the art of
entertaining, from table service to the diplomatic campaign of guest placement. Every
successful reception is about good dramaturgy.

Françoise organises events, dinners, weddings and ceremonies for others that are as wonderful as
they are discreet. Among her client royal families and large luxury groups, foundations of
"first ladies" and prestigious museums, she takes us into the intimacy of those who have
become her friends, from the Monaco family to the Arnault family, from Bernadette Chirac
to Karl Lagerfeld.

Since 1980, Françoise Dumas has been at the head of “Françoise Dumas-Anne Roustang &
associés”, a public relations agency specialising in the organisation of receptions, of which she is
the founder. Maîtresse de cérémonies is her first book.

53