It’s French literary award season, and listed below are the books the juries say belong in your ever-growing “To Read” listing — plus one they ignored however you shouldn’t.
The prize for successful the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award, is a cheque for €10, which winners apparently are likely to have framed — maybe at larger expense than the precise prize cash — and displayed proudly on the wall of their workplace or writing nook.
The Prix Renaudot, in the meantime, comes with no money award in any respect. But each prizes – together with the Prix Médicis, the Femina Prize, and the Académie Française Grand Prix du Roman — all increase e book gross sales enormously.
To sustain together with your well-read mates, listed below are some French books it’s best to decide up subsequent time you go to your pleasant neighbourhood librairie.
La Maison Vide (The Empty House)
It wanted only one spherical of voting by the jury of the Prix Goncourt to award the celebrated literary prize to Laurent Mauvignier for La Maison Vide — a forensic, fourth wall-breaking, fictional tour of his household’s previous, beginning together with his great-great-grandmother, via the medium of heirlooms and mementoes.
The 750-page novel, which has greater than an air of thriller about it, had earlier claimed the Prix littéraire Le Monde and the Prix des libraires de Nancy-Le Point, and was a Femina prize nominee.
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Kolkhoze
There’s one thing about fictionalised household histories amongst this 12 months’s award-winning works of French literature. Emmanuel Carrère’s extremely romanticised story of 4 generations of his household — notably his mom, historian and politician Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, who died in 2023 — was awarded the Prix Médicis the day after the Prix Goncourt winner was introduced.
Carrère received the Prix Femina in 1995 for La Classe de neige and the Prix Renaudot in 2011 for Limonov.
La Nuit au cœur (Night within the Heart)
Nathacha Appanah was awarded the 2025 Femina Prize for French Fiction for her novel La Nuit au cœur, which intertwines the fates of three girls caught in a spiral of male violence, analyzing the homicide of Chahinez Daoud, who was burned alive by her husband in 2021, in addition to that of her cousin Emma.
The e book was additionally nominated for the Prix Goncourt.
Passagères de nuit (Night passengers)
Yanick Lahens was awarded the Académie Française Grand Prix du Roman for Passagères de nuit, a wealthy and complicated work that recollects slavery and the struggles of the resilient and defiant girls of Haiti and New Orleans throughout the nineteenth century.
The main characters of the story are the writer’s grandmother and great-grandmother — Elizabeth, born in New Orleans in 1818, who fled to Port-au-Prince after escaping an tried rape; and Regina, born in Haiti some 50 years later, who recounts a life marked by poverty and racism in a letter to her dying lover.
Je voulais vivre (I Wanted to Live)
Journalist and writer Adélaïde de Clermont-Tonnerre, a earlier winner of the Académie Française Grand Prix du Roman for her 2016 novel Le Dernier des nôtres, delves into fiction for her Prix Renaudot-winning biography of types of Alexandre Dumas’ spy in The Three Musketeers, Milady de Winter, piecing collectively snippets of her previous from the unique basic story, and filling in a single or two gaps to current a portrait of a genuinely unbiased lady in an unreconstructedly masculine world.
Last 12 months’s prix Rendaudot winner, Jacaranda, has bought greater than 344,000 copies since its launch and was one of many top-five best-selling books of 2024.
Asterix en Lusitanie
Comic books, graphic novels, name them what you’ll… France has a proud custom of blending phrases and photos in books, and the forty first quantity of the much-loved adventures of tiny powerhouse Gaul and his menhir-hauling good friend — who this time head to Portugal — is assured to be a Christmas favorite.
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Disclaimer: The above ideas are in French. If you are not fairly able to tackle a thick French novel, here is a listing of books about France which you could simply discover in English.
