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Dear friends,
We are delighted to unveil our Fall Fiction Rights List:
Should you be interested in receiving material, do not hesitate to contact us.
This Fall, we will attend the Frankfurt and the Sharjah book fairs, visiting clients in Italy and Finland, and holding digital appointments at your convenience. Do send us an e-mail!
We very much looking forward to reconnecting with all of you.
The Rights Team
Claire Berest
Rights sold to Italy (Neri Pozza), UK (Mountain Leopard Press)
Option in Hungary (Libri Publishing), Israel (Keter), Kuwait (Dar Kalemat) and Taïwan (Sun Color Culture).
English sample available
A cop who collects orchids in his Paris apartment. Mysterious, unauthorised artistic performances in the capital’s major museums… What if crime were an art?
Why has the exemplary police officer Abel Bac been suspended?
Who illegally took a horse into the Pompidou Centre?
Who dropped off copies of a newspaper outside Abel’s apartment, a newspaper featuring the same horse?
What tragic past event are these strange coincidences reminding him of?
This series of disturbances will lead him inexorably to Mila, a mysterious and anonymous international artist who stirs up crowds and the world of contemporary art with her confrontational performances. Caught in the eye of the storm, the suspended police officer tentatively investigates, helped – whether he wants it or not – by Camille, a colleague concerned by is unexplained absence, and Elsa, a neighbour who turns up at his door one evening blind drunk.
A heart-stopping investigation with a shockingly unexpected resolution.
Claire Berest is the author of many novels that have enjoyed public and critical acclaim, including Bellevue (Stock, 2016) as well as Gabriële, co-written with her sister Anne Berest. Her 2019 book Rien n’est noir, a colourful depiction of the love story between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (100,000 copies sold), was translated into 8 languages and won the Elle magazine readers’ prize.
Justine Lévy
Option in Poland.
“To heal me is a crime” – Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud was a French writer, poet, dramatist, visual artist, actor and theatre director, widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century theater and the European surrealist avant-garde. As a writer, he wrote experimental texts with themes of introspection, mysticism, drug use, and his experiences with schizophrenia. This mythic figure has indeed been locked up in psychiatric hospitals for years.
Dive deep into the imaginary diary of Antonin Artaud’s mother. She devoted her life attempting to save her son, to understand his genius and his madness. What is her share of responsibility in her son’s state of health? What part do his fellow members of the literary intelligentsia play? What are the questions that haunt a woman who does not know if the electroshocks and experimental treatments she consents to in the name of her son are healing him or dragging him deeper into insanity?
Justine Lévy is the author, among other bestselling books, of Rien de grave, Mauvaise fille and Histoires de famille. Rien de grave has been translated in 18 countries. Son fils is her first non-autobiographical and most literary text.
Rights sold to Germany (Hanser) and the Netherlands (Cossee).
A photo album bought at a flea market. A literary investigation that reads like a deeply moving kaddish.
369. That’s how many photo-booth pictures Jacob B’chiri took of himself between 1973 and 1974. What was the point of these pre-selfie selfies? In them, Jacob reinvents himself as different characters, one bearded, another clean-shaven, one in uniform, another in a casual short-sleeved shirt. Actor, steward, spy? On the backs of the photos are addresses – from Rome to Basel and Marseille to Barbès in Paris – that deepen the enigma; and names and nicknames that look like aliases.
When Christophe Boltanski opened this flea market find, he wanted to understand who this man was. His need to know took him to abandoned shops, stretches of wasteland, high-security premises, then cemeteries in Djerba, and finally the fringes of the Negev Desert and the foot of Mount Hermon in Israel. The author patiently reconstructs the lives that Jacob lived and dreamed with their combination of a paradise lost, exile, longing for revenge, war and artistic ambitions.
The novelist and journalist Christophe Boltanski is the author of Minerais de sang, Le guetteur and La Cache, which won the 2015 prix Femina and ran to 120,000 copies.
Clara Dupont-Monod
Prix Femina 2021.
Prix Goncourt des Lycéens 2021.
Prix Landerneau des lecteurs 2021
Rithgs sold to Brazil (Dublinense), Croatia (Znanje, auctions), Germany (Piper, auctions), Greece (Psichogios), Italy (Clichy), the Netherlands (Meulenhoff, auctions), Portugal (Presença), Saudi Arabia (Dar Athar WAL, auctions), Spain (Salamandra/Castillan, Les Hores/Catalan), Russia (Polyandra No Age), Taiwan (Marco Polo) and UK (MacLehose Press, WEL)
A child born with disabilities turns the whole family dynamic upside down and redefines his siblings’ lives.
This is the story of a dark-eyed child lost in a hazy limbo, a child forever bedridden, an eternal baby, a maladjusted child who creates a boundary between his family and other people. It is the story of his place in the household he’s born into, surrounded by burgeoning nature and protective mountains, of his place within this deeply shaken family. The eldest child connects with him, is close to him, and loses himself in the process. His sister develops feelings of disgust and anger. And lastly, the baby of the family who comes later, after his disabled brother has died, after the older two have left, and who lives in the shadow of family ghosts but still brings hope of reconciliation.
A wonderful, luminous book.
Clara Dupont-Monod is the author of several novels including La Passion selon Juette (Grasset, 2007), Le roi disait que j’étais diable (Grasset, 2014) and, published by Stock in 2018, La Révolte, which sold 63,000 copies.
Simonetta Greggio
Shortlisted for the Prix Interallié
In this “autobiography of Italy”, family upheavals collide with the dark, bloody years of fascism. Where private history meets national history…
“What drove me to abandon my family, my home and my mother tongue as a young woman? Why did I leave behind my friends, my younger brothers, my mother and my country?
What makes a gentle person like my father suddenly turn into a monster?
What was this evil consuming me, almost killing me?
It goes by the name of Italy: my pain, my love, my native land.
A country that hasn’t settled its accounts with fascism, which it invented.
A country like a family, full of secrets – noisy, destructive and murderous.”
Born in Padua in 1961, Simonetta Greggio has lived in France since 1981. She has written many novels, including La Douceur des hommes (2005), Dolce Vita (2010; 50,000 copies sold), L’homme qui aimait ma femme (2012), published by Stock, and Elsa mon amour, published by Flammarion. She also works as a journalist and a producer for France Culture.
Emmanuelle Lambert
A daughter’s homage to her father. A deeply affecting ode to life.
This account begins one Sunday in September 2019, a Sunday when Emmanuelle Lambert’s father was preparing to die of cancer in a small structure at the top of his pancreas.
In it a daughter describes her father: a committed but enigmatic father who would probably have preferred a son. She responds to this hyperactive May ’68 rebel, her unpredictable childhood god, this sad ex-child who’s still playing in the closing phase of his life even as he reaches its end – she responds as a girl building her life as a woman.
Emmanuelle Lambert is the author of several titles including the novel La Désertion (Stock, 2018), and the literary essay Giono, furioso (Stock, 2019), which won the 2019 prix Femina for an essay.
Constance Rivière
Three generations of women reduced to silence. A family home that harbours a weighty secret.
A young woman wants to see her grandmother who’s dying in hospital, but she can’t get t o her. To counter this forced solitude, she summons her memories of her: the family home, the warm light of childhood, the books of fairy tales, the chestnut tree and the soft caress of its low-hanging branches… and hugs from her grandmother who blazes with life.
But there’s a shadow over this picture. Her eccentric mother refuses to set foot in the house and never breaks her self-imposed silence.
The hours and minutes in a life are numbered and the young woman realises she urgently needs to understand. What happened in the house?
Constance Rivière’s 2019 novel Une fille sans histoire was shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize for a first novel and is currently being adapted for the big screen.
Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba
Rights have been sold to Italy (Lindau), Germany (DTV, 5-figure deal) the Netherlands (Prometheus, 5-figure deal, at auction), Spain (Minúscula editorial, 3-book deal), Sweden (Editions J) and the UK (Mountain Leopard Press).
English sample available
Hunt or be hunted.
Raphaëlle is a forest warden, estranged from her family and living alone in a trailer, miles from civilisation. In the savage cradle of nature, daily life is fraught with dangers. The forest is alive with bears, coyotes and lynxes – and, with no signal in reach, nobody can save you if a predator strikes. On the eve of her fortieth birthday, Raphaëlle is shaken to discover fresh bear prints outside her front door. But when man-sized footprints appear a few days later, she realises the true predator is even more sinister…
Unfolding over three weeks in late September, Savengers plunges us into a shadowy world of illegal poaching and sexual violence, as Raphaëlle’s calling to protect the laws of the forest sees her become the hunter’s prey. Yet two can play at that game, and this gritty eco-warrior won’t go down without a fight.
A revenge feminist tale, as well as a compelling love story, Savengers will appeal as much to the nature writing readers of The Eight mountains by Paolo Cognetti’s than to readers of strong female novelists such as Virginie Despentes or Aminatta Forma.
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 a first novel Encabanée, rights to which have been sold in France, Germany and Italy.
Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba
Discover the sequel to Savengers.
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 Sauvagines, 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…
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 a first novel Encabanée, rights to which have been sold in France, Germany and Italy.
Leïla Slimani
Over 85.000 copies sold/ Total print-run: 110.000 copies (15 reprints).
Sold to Germany (Luchterhand), Italy (La Nave di Teseo), Slovakia (Inaque), Spain (Cabaret Voltaire, Castilian, world), Taiwan (Ecus), United Kingdom (Hodder) and United States (Mobius).
Leïla Slimani, winner of the 2016 prix Goncourt, doesn’t like leaving home and prefers solitude to entertainment. So why agree to spend a sleepless night in the Punta della Dogona Museum in Venice?
Reflecting upon the “impossibility” of a book whilst subtly digressing in the Venetian night, Leila Slimani talks about herself, about imprisonment, intimacy, identity, being caught in the middle, between East and West.
A discreet, sensitive confession in which the author mentions her father who was once imprisoned.
But this book – with its intensity and inner fire – is also about beauty disappearing and how urgently we must make the most of it. It is about the glory of the ephemeral.
At dawn, although awake and alert, the author emerges from the building as if from a dream, and all that is left of her night is the smell of flowers.
Leïla Slimani was born in 1981. She has written three acclaimed novels published by Gallimard, including Lullaby, which won the 2016 Prix Goncourt, was sold to 44 countries and has sold over a million copies in France.
Philippe Claudel
Rights sold to Croatia (Bozicevic), Italy (Ponte Alle Grazie), the Netherlands (De Bezige Bij), Spain (Salamandra), United Kingdom (MacLehose Press, UK & Commonwealth) and Taiwan (Ecus).
Which of us is guilty? Or innocent? A cruel story that will haunt readers for a long time.
A German soldier in the jaws of defeat stumbles through a forest. Dressed in rags, he is cold and hungry. When he sees a light in a warehouse and feels its warmth, he thinks he has found refuge, but instead meets his fate.
Several years later a Jewish teenager who lost his family in World War II wanders into the woods while playing and finds the ashes of the soldier’s burnt body in the factory…
Elsewhere, a gruff young woman mistreats a resident in a hospice, but which of the two is more cruel, given that the apparently peaceful old man likes to sing Nazi marching songs?
By connecting these stories, the author of Les Âmes grises constructs a fable about the human condition. Which of us is the victim, which the torturer? The reader is invited to fill in the blanks in this intriguing text and to build his or her own version of the truth.
Philippe Claudel is a writer and film director. His most acclaimed books are Les Âmes grises (winner of the 2003 prix Renaudot and translated into more than 30 languages), La Petite Fille de Monsieur Linh (2005), Le Rapport de Brodeck (winner of the 2007 prix Goncourt des lycéens) and L’Archipel du chien (2018). He lives in Lorraine in eastern France and has strong links with Germany: “If twentieth-century Germany serves as a frame for these stories, it’s partly because the themes I’m talking about haven’t so fully reached their tragic incarnation anywhere else. It’s also because, having been a neighbour to German since my childhood, I feel both drawn to and afraid of its geography, culture, language and history, in a way that I don’t with any other country in the world. For me, Germany has always been like a mirror in which I see myself not as I am, but as I could have been. As such, it has taught me a great deal about myself.”
Jacky Durand
A French woman living alone during World War II has a love affair that reveals things she didn’t know about herself.
August 1939. Marguerite couldn’t be happier, she is marrying Pierre, her childhood sweetheart. A month-long honeymoon in their small house in eastern France. Then Pierre is mobilised and France is occupied. Marguerite will have to cope with loneliness and the rigours of an increasingly hostile world, but she will also discover friendship, her own strength, and swirl of emotions. As she gets to know Raymonde, the postwoman freed from social constraints, André, the young Romany she’s taken in, and Franz, a German soldier full of humanity, she gradually takes control of her life, her body and her feelings.
Jacky Durand is a food reporter. His sensual, foodie gastronomical pieces delight thousands of readers and listeners. His second novel Les recettes de la vie sold 30,000 copies in France and was translated into 19 languages.
Colombe Schneck
Two inseparable little girls. Or nearly…
Esther and Héloïse have always had it easy. Born with silver spoons in their mouths, they’re good old-fashioned daddy’s girls who have never had to fight for what they want. These two little girls from good families are very alike, they grow up together and follow the same path: they marry, have children, divorce at the same time, have similar love affairs… until the day when death comes knocking at one of their doors.
Colombe Schneck has published five very well received novels, including La Réparation which was translated into several languages. A significant contemporary woman’s voice that combines humour with emotion.