Over the past year, there have been some great new releases of children’s books translated from French. Here are just a few of my favourites. The Acrobat Family by Anouck B
In All Men Want to Know, Nina Bouraoui recounts her own experiences of growing up in Algeria and France. With an Algerian father and French mother, Nina is torn between the two cou
Prize-winning Swiss novelist Roland Buti writes novels that seem at first glance to be charmingly bucolic. Indeed, his most recent novel, Grand National, does take us from the gree
Philippe Jaccottet was born in 1925 in Switzerland, but has lived in France since the mid-1940s. Apart from poetry, he also writes prose and essays; his bibliography is several doz
Luca and Claus, two mirror-like twins forming one single main character, are abandoned by their mother at the beginning of the French Occupation, in a small village near to the Ger
Julia Kerninon is a French novelist from Brittany, whose first novel Buvard (2013) won the prestigious Prix Françoise Sagan. A Respectable Occupation is her most recent work to be
Antoine Laurain will, for me, always be associated with time-shifting and ‘magic’ – as in his previous novels, Vintage 1954 and The President’s Hat. The Readers’ Room, on
Vernon Subutex is a fictional biography that addresses several prominent themes of our times. The narrative is driven by a lament for French counterculture and for the country’s
The remarkable success Sébastien Japrisot achieved with his highly engaging crime novels in his native France (where he was called the country’s Graham Greene) has not really be
How easy is it to reinvigorate a shopworn formula? One way is to shoot each familiar effect full of adrenalin. The other is to inject subtly innovative elements into the detail, su
