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Dear friends,
We are delighted to unveil our 2023 Spring Fiction Rights List.
We will be attending the London Book Fair in April. Do send us an e-mail should you wish to book an appointment!
You can also drop by our stand at the IRC table U18 and U19.
Don’t forget to peek in our 2023 Spring Non-Fiction Rights List.
We very much looking forward to hearing from you!
The Rights Team
Highlights
Dusk
Philippe Claudel
Shortlisted for the Prix RTL/Lire
Novel - January 2023 - 512 pages
Rights sold to the Netherlands (De Bezige Bij), Spain (Salamandra for Castillan, Angle for Catalan) and Taiwan (Ecus).
Option in Croatia (Bozicevic), Italy (Ponte Alle Grazie), Lithuania (Baltos Lankos), Russia (Eksmo), Slovakia (Inaque), Turkey (Yapi Kredi) and the United Kingdom (The Mountain Leopard Press, UK & Commonwealth).
A dark and faithful portrait of unspoken human impulses.
On the fringes of a declining empire, a dozed village is paralysed by the cold and the biting wind.
One day, the local priest is found dead with his head smashed by a stone. Who could have hated this man in a place where Christians and Muslims have always lived in harmony? What if this murder is the starting point for a whole implacable geometry of criminal acts and cruelty between neighbours?
Nourio, an olive-skinned policeman with uncontrollable urges, is delighted to be handling a case like this which breaks the monotony of this forgotten backwater. With his deputy Baraj – a man with the soul of a child poet hidden behind a placid exterior – he soon finds his investigations are futile. All the characters, in the flesh and in their flaws, fit the bill as tragedy unfolds. Among them is Lémia, a teenager whose budding figure plays on Nourio’s nerves. What’s the point in fighting the unstoppable course of events?
The twists and suspense of this gripping intrigue are paired with profound reflection on the bad habits of the modern world, our attempts to rewrite history, and our denial of some mass crimes.
The author
A writer whose work has been translated and published in more than thirty countries, Philippe Claudel is also a filmmaker and playwright. His acclaimed books published by Editions Stock include Grey Souls (winner of the 2003 prix Renaudot), Monsieur Linh and his Child (2005), Brodeck’s Report (2007 prix Goncourt des lycéens), The Investigation (2010), The Tree of the Toraja (2016), Inhumaines (2017) and Dog Island (2018). He has directed four films: I’ve Loved You So Long, which won two César awards, Tous les soleils, Before the Winter Chill and A Childhood. He is secretary-general of the Académie Goncourt, and lives in the Lorraine region where he was born in 1962.
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Click hereBivouac
Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba
Novel - February 2023 - 416 pages
Rights sold to Italy (Lindau) and Spain (Minúscula editorial).
Option in Germany (DTV), the Netherlands (Prometheus), Sweden (Editions J) and UK (Mountain Leopard Press).
Discover the sequel to Feral.
Kamouraska, present day. Everywhere, the signs of climate emergency are glaring – birds falling dead from the sky, the seasons in disarray… Yet Quebec’s political leaders are turning a blind eye, and a new oil pipeline project is set to decimate the region’s ancient forestlands.
It’s a race against time. And if the politicians won’t act, the people must take the fight into their own hands. As the diggers roll in, the incognito militants of the “Green Rev” launch Operation Bivouac: a plan to occupy Kamouraska’s imperilled woodlands and save Gros Pin, the forest’s oldest resident.
Bivouac follows Raphaëlle and Anouk, stars of Feral, and Riopelle, Anouk’s old flame, as lovers past and present join forces to block the ruthless path of deforestation.
But Gros Pin isn’t the only one in danger. When their shared project reignites old passions and stokes the beast of corporate greed, suddenly relationships and lives are on the line…
The author
In the winter of 2013, Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba left her job, home and family in Montreal, sold all her worldly belongings and moved into a wooden cabin in Quebec’s remote Kamouraska region. There, she spent three years living deep in the forest, without running water, electricity or phone signal, and with only prowling coyotes for company outside. She has written three novels Encabanée, Sauvagines and Bivouac.
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Click hereNew Fiction
The Great She-Bear
Maylis Adhémar
Novel - January 2023 - 342 pages
In the style of nature writing, this novel explores the role of people who talk the language of animals in an increasingly urban world.
Born on a farm in an Ariège valley, Zita escapes the life mapped out for her as a shepherd and studies agronomy. When she returns to Ossèse five years later, she rediscovers the log cabin up in the peaks, the ewes, and her grandmother Petite-Mère’s animal fables. One evening, she meets Pierrick, a city dweller, in the village café and their love story sees her move in with him. She leaves the peaks for an apartment which is already home to Pierrick’s young daughter Inés as well as his ex-partner Emilie.
One autumn day, the body of the bear Anis is found on the ewes’ summer pasture. She was shot right between the eyes. Zita embarks on a heart-breaking hunt for the killer which gradually sees her break down the cordial understanding between urbanites and mountain folk. But she herself is torn between two worlds and must choose between predator and prey.
The author
Born in 1985, Maylis Adhémar lives in Toulouse. After an agriculture-based baccalaureate and a history degree, she became a journalist. She designs journalism workshops for young people in rural communities. Her first novel, Bénie soit Sixtine (Julliard), was published in 2020.
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Click hereHis Smell After the Rain
Cédric Sapin-Defour
Novel - March 2023 - 288 pages
English sample available.
A story of life, death, and love between two different species: a man and his dog.
A small ad in the local paper turns the narrator’s world upside down: a litter of Bernese Mountain dogs are looking for homes. The idea of curing of his loneliness with a new companion appeals to him and becomes inescapable once he meets the “puppy with the blue collar”. Just choosing a name is quite an adventure. The waiting is unbearable, like when lovers can’t be together. And all sorts of preparations are made for the new arrival.
As Ubac grows, he plays – in every sense – a bigger and bigger role in the narrator’s life. We witness the beginnings of an understanding that needs no words. Man and dog both crave their long walks in the mountains, hate to be apart, and protect each other. This special connection is then extended to new arrivals in the pack: Mathilde, Cordée and Frison.
Over the course of thirteen years, we’re kept in suspense by an unpredictable affection, a life lived too fast, the aching pain of separation and the happy memories that demonstrate a universal love.
The author
Cédric Sapin-Defour is 47 and writes about the slightly crazy dream that “man and nature are learning to live together again”. His previous books are Gravir les montagnes est une affaire de style and Espresso (published by Guérin), and L’Art de la Trace (Transboréal).
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Click hereThe Swimmer of Bizerte
Didier Decoin
Novel - January 2023 - 450 pages
Option in Czech Republic (Albatros), Greece (Stereoma), Italy (Ponte Alle Grazie), Lithuania (Alma Littera), Poland (WAB Foksal), Romania (Humanitas), Russia (Eksmo), Serbia (Geopoetika), Taiwan (Chi Ming) and the UK (MacLehose Press, WEL).
A novel that plunges the reader into the frantic scramble during the collapse of the Russian empire.
January 1921 in Bizerte, during the French protectorate in Tunisia.
Tarik Aït Mokhtari, a tall and muscular young Kabyle, is as beautiful as he is poor. He lives in Bizerte with his widowed mother and his sister. A dockworker in Bizerte’s port, he is swimming in the middle of the lagoon when he comes across a metal structure. It’s an old battle cruiser under the flag of the Russian navy. At the time he is unaware of events in Russia: a bloody civil war, the Bolshevik revolution and the exiling of aristocrats stripped of all their assets. But he realises that there are people on the ship, including a young woman who bowls him over with her beauty and her voice. He is instantly captivated by her.
Yelena Maksimova Mannenkhova is the daughter of a wealthy Ukrainian baron. Chaperoned by her aunt Sofia, she has fled the same horror as an entire social class. But since 18th December 1920, all Russian exiles seeking refuge in Bizerte have been ordered to stay on their ships for four years: the Georguii Pobiedonossetz, which was Yelena’s and her family’s last hope, is also her prison.
Since his epiphany, Tarik tries to meet Yelena at all cost. She grows fond of the young dockworker as she adapts to her new impoverished life while still clings to her former illusions. Will they succeed in admitting their love even with their differences? And can they survive despite the ravages of history?
The author
Born in 1945, Didier Decoin is an author and scriptwriter who published his first book at the age of twenty. This was followed by some twenty further titles, including Abraham de Brooklyn (winner of the prix des Libraires), and John l’Enfer for which he was awarded the 1977 prix Goncourt.
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Click hereNothing to Lose
Hanneli Victoire
Novel - February 2023 - 220 pages
A dazzling first work about the end of adolescence, finding oneself and one’s true identity.
“This is the story of the disease of being ourselves that we all accept. Accepting that, to be truly cured, we must want to die. Not waiting to be hurt but harming ourselves, being vulnerable, crying before we’re damaged and finally admitting it, saying it, shouting it out loud.”
At just 20, the protagonist escapes the depths of the countryside for Paris and university. In a city where every kind of diversity seems to be acceptable at last, he starts spending time in the queer world and makes some friends. Despite his high expectations, this new life doesn’t succeed in distracting him from his own sense of nonconformity.
Uncomfortable in his own skin but finally free to explore his identity, he realises that his problems stem from the shame he feels about his social background and his biological sex. He begins to hope he can change class just as he admits to himself that he is a boy.
The author transcribes the journey of a young trans man searching for his true identity as well as his discovery of first love and of a well-heeled queer world.
The author
Hanneli Victoire is a journalist. Nothing to Lose is his first book.
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Click hereRecent Highlights
Beyrouth-upon-the Seine
Sabyl Ghoussoub
Prix Goncourt des Lycéens 2022
Novel - August 2022 - 320 pages
Rights sold to Croatia (Naklada Ljevak) and Lebanon (Dar al Jadeed, WAL).
A bittersweet novel about family, immigration and what remains of our roots.
1975. On the eve of the war in Lebanon, the narrator’s parents decide to move to Paris for two years. They are unaware that they will have to wait a very long time before being able to return to their country.
In their minds, Paris was a fairytale city. But reality was far from their expectations. The couple is faced with contempt, xenophobia, financial difficulties and, above all, homesickness. How can they live amid all this Parisian strangeness, whilst their family and friends are facing a real war?
The years go by. The son is born in Paris, far from the land of his parents and grandparents. While the conflict continues in Lebanon, while Paris too is threatened by bombs and terrorism, this faraway country where the narrator draws his roots becomes a horizon in his day-to-day life, the meeting point of his dreams. So the bond must be maintained, whatever it takes. Lebanon means family.
The author
Born in Paris in 1988 to a Lebanese family, Sabyl Ghoussoub writes the literaty column “Quoi qu’on en lise” in the French-lebanese daily L’Orient-Le Jour. From 2011 to 2015, he was the head of the Lebanese Film Festival in Beyrouth. In 2018, he published Le nez juif and Beyrouth entre parentheses (Éditions l’Antilope).
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Click hereWhen You Listen to This Song
Lola Lafon
Prix Les Inrockuptibles 2022
Prix Décembre 2022
Narrative Non-Fiction/Art - August 2022 - 256 pages
Rights sold to Brazil (Paris de Historias), Germany (Aufbau), Italy (Einaudi, preempt), the Netherlands (De Arbeiderspers, auctions), Slovakia (Inaque), Spain (Alianza, WSL, auctions) and US (Yale UP, WEL).
Option in China (Haitian), Japan (Hayakawa), and Russia (Corpus).
Lola Lafon spends a night in Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, an empty museum haunted by absence.
“Anne Frank is so much a story ‘everyone knows’ that no one actually knows that much about it. Because ‘everyone knows’ doesn’t mean ‘everyone understands’, but that we’re in a hurry to move on, and tidy this little ghost away in a museum.
The Anne Frank House is an empty apartment. What visitors file past is the absence of its inhabitants. And it’s this emptiness that transforms the apartment, the annexe, into a museum. But that emptiness doesn’t exist. It is peopled with reflections that bear witness to the chasm left by Anne Frank’s death.
I will go from one room to another all through the night as if an emergency is still hiding there, waiting to be found.”
The author
Lola Lafon grew up in Eastern Europe between Sofia et Bucharest. She studied Dance and Music in Paris and New York. Her literary output of six novels to date is distinctive for its thorough exploration of narrative forms. La petite communiste qui ne souriait jamais (Actes Sud, 2014) was translated into 11 languages and awarded many prizes including the Madame Figaro Heroine Prize, the prix de la Closerie de Lilas and the prix Étonnants Voyageurs. Chavirer (Actes Sud, 2020) was translated into 16 languages and awarded the prix Landerneau, the prix France Culture Télérama and the Swiss Choix Goncourt.
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Click here"MY NIGHT IN THE MUSEUM" SERIES
Shifting the Moon from Its Orbit
Andrea Marcolongo
Narrative Non-Fiction/Art - April 2023 - 240 pages
Rights sold to Italy (Einaudi).
Offer in UK & US.
Option in Greece (Patakis), the Netherlands (Wereldbibliotheek), Slovenia (Athenaeum), Spain (Taurus/Penguin Random House).
An intimate yet universal text about our relationship with language and the question of identity.
Andrea Marcolongo spent a a night with a waning moon completely alone on the cold floor of the Acropolis Museum in Athens. But can you really be alone when you’re watched by thousands of eyes carved in marble?
Come nightfall, it wasn’t so much the presence of these unfamiliar eyes that unsettled the author, but rather the absences. All that’s left in this museum, or any museum in Athens, are offcuts: One of Zeus’s hands, a horse’s head, a section of pediment from a temple. The West was built on fragments of marble torn from Greece with pickaxes and sent to England by Lord Elgin in the 19th Century.
In this museum that howls in silence about this collective theft the author considered what shapes our identity and spent her night haunted by a feeling of being just another impostor: “I’m not Greek, I don’t speak modern Greek, but I still built my life and my writing on this theft.”
The author
Andrea Marcolongo was born in Crema in 1987. A Hellenist with a classics degree from Milan’s Università degli Studi, she is the author of La lingua geniale (2018), La misura eroica (2019), Alla fonte delle parole (2020) and La lezione di Enea (2021). Her books have been published in translation in 28 countries. She now lives in Paris.
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Click hereKing Kasaï
Christophe Boltanski
Narrative Non-Fiction/Art - January 2023 - 160 pages
Rights sold to Italy (ADD Editore)
Option in Germany (Hanser) and the Netherlands (Cossee).
Christophe Boltanski feels his way through the underbelly of European colonial history.
When it was opened in 1897, the Royal Museum of Central Africa near Brussels showcased Belgian colonialism in Congo. On an initiative of Léopold II, stuffed animals, geological samples, food products, and objects of ethnographic and artistic interest from Congo were unveiled. A whole African village was even recreated in the grounds, costing the lives of its seven inhabitants.
Reopened four years ago as the Africa Museum, the establishment is still struggling to come to terms with its dark past. The author Christophe Boltanski decides to spend a night in this place full of ghosts in order to learn to live with them. Entering like an explorer in an ecosystem full of ferocious wild animals, he also finds statues and other clichés snapshots of the European colonial era, including the stuffed body of King Kasaï. This elephant was hunted and shot to order for the museum and was a propaganda tool for Léopold II’s colonial project for many years.
Setting off in the footsteps of the hunter who took part in this zoological expedition and killed the elephant in 1956, the author ventures into the heart of the most violent darkness – our memories.
The author
The writer and journalist Christophe Boltanski is the author of Minerais de sang (Grasset, 2012), La Cache (Stock, 2015), which won the 2015 prix Femina and sold 120, 000 copies, Le Guetteur (Stock, 2018), and Les Vies de Jacob (Stock, 2021).
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