This novel,a classic of African literature, still speaks to us today. We look back at Africa’s grotesques like Idi Amin of Uganda, Bokassa of the Central African Empire or Zaire’s Mobutu, but now we must also look around us at comic opera heads of state posturing extravagantly on our domestic stages. We need this cleansing laughter.“Is the funny bone a literary erogenous zone? Anyone who thinks so will certainly be turned on by Henri Lopes’ The Laughing Cry . . . this writer has th...

This novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author asks what happens when the grim reaper decides to stop reaping: "A novel to die for."— The Washington PostOn the first day of the new year, no one dies. This of course causes consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand, there is initially celebration—flags are hung out on balconies, people dance in the streets. They ha...

“Look, for people who’re going to be dead soon, we’re not doing too badly.”“The novel of the year” is what La Presse called this extraordinary book, a love story that takes place in the days leading up to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. A first work of fiction by one of French Canada’s most admired journalists, Gil Courtemanche, it was first published in Quebec in 2000, spent more than a year on bestseller lists and won the Prix des Libraires, the booksellers’ award ...

Every summer, young Andrei visits his grandmother, Charlotte Lemmonier, whom he loves dearly. In a dusty village overlooking the vast Russian steppes, she captivates her grandson and the other children of the village with wondrous tales-watching Proust play tennis in Neuilly, Tsar Nicholas II’s visit to Paris, French president Felix Faure dying in the arms of his mistress. But from his mysterious grandmother, Andrei also learns of a Russia he has never known: a country of famine and misery...

NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR • One of the most widely read novels of all time—from one of the best-known writers of all time—about a lawyer from Paris who brilliantly illuminates the human condition.Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality.

Paris, 1878: Eccentric antiquarian Lord Littleby and his ten servants are found murdered in Littleby’s mansion on the rue de Grenelle, and a priceless Indian shawl is missing. Police commissioner “Papa” Gauche recovers only one piece of evidence from the crime scene: a golden key shaped like a whale. Gauche soon deduces that the key is in fact a ticket of passage for the Leviathan, a gigantic steamship soon to depart Southampton on its maiden voyage to Calcutta. The murderer must ...

Why would a French aristocrat renounce his country and live in exile? The answer lies in the Paris of the 1890s; a world of superficial glamour but, under the surface, deep social and political strife. The army, discredited by the Dreyfus case, was being purged. The young de Richleau, cadet and then instructor at the military academy of St. Cyr, became involved in a conspiracy - to restore the French monarchy - with the Duc de Vendome being secretly coached in his future role of King....

The unforgettable memoir of 70 years of contemporary and personal history from the great French filmmaker, journalist and intellectual Claude LanzmannBorn to a Jewish family in Paris, 1925, Lanzmann's first encounter with radicalism was as part of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation. He and his father were soldiers of the underground until the end of the war, smuggling arms and making raids on the German army. After the liberation of France, he studied philoso...

A PEOPLE BOOK OF THE WEEKWINNER OF THE JQ–WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE“A haunting tribute to survivors and those lost forever—and a reminder, in our own troubled era, never to forget.” —PeopleAn “exceptional” (The Wall Street Journal) and “poignant” (The New York Times) book in the tradition of rediscovered works like Suite Française and Th...

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the community and eventually leads his fellow-miners in a strike protesting against pay-cuts - a strike which becomes a lo...

The military cult classic with resonance to the wars in Iraq and Vietnam—now back in printWhen The Centurions was first published in 1960, readers were riveted by the thrilling account of soldiers fighting for survival in hostile environments. They were equally transfixed by the chilling moral question the novel posed: how to fight when the “age of heroics is over.” As relevant today as it was half a century ago, The Centurions is a gripping milit...

By the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature'There is a wonderful sardonic eloquence to this unnamed narrator's voice' Financial Times'I don't think I've ever read a novel that is so convincingly and hauntingly sad about the loss of home' Independent on Sunday_____________________He thinks, as he escapes from Zanzibar, that he will probably never return, and yet the dr...