Welcome to July’s #RivetingReviews, part of the European Literature Network’s French Book Week, organised in partnership with Pro Helvetia. We…

July 2020 – French Book Week
Over the past year, there have been some great new releases of children’s books translated from French. Here are just…
In All Men Want to Know, Nina Bouraoui recounts her own experiences of growing up in Algeria and France. With…
Prize-winning Swiss novelist Roland Buti writes novels that seem at first glance to be charmingly bucolic. Indeed, his most recent…
Philippe Jaccottet was born in 1925 in Switzerland, but has lived in France since the mid-1940s. Apart from poetry, he…
Luca and Claus, two mirror-like twins forming one single main character, are abandoned by their mother at the beginning of…
Julia Kerninon is a French novelist from Brittany, whose first novel Buvard (2013) won the prestigious Prix Françoise Sagan. A…
Antoine Laurain will, for me, always be associated with time-shifting and ‘magic’ – as in his previous novels, Vintage 1954…
Vernon Subutex is a fictional biography that addresses several prominent themes of our times. The narrative is driven by a…
The remarkable success Sébastien Japrisot achieved with his highly engaging crime novels in his native France (where he was called…
How easy is it to reinvigorate a shopworn formula? One way is to shoot each familiar effect full of adrenalin.…
First of all: don’t trust the name. Fred Vargas, one of the most acclaimed of all current European crime writers,…
It was late in the day but still early in the genocide of August 2014 as the sun began to…