Literary Rentrée
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Head of Rights
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Foreign Rights Manager
For Brazilian, Eastern Europe, Italian, Portuguese, South American and Spanish inquiries
Dear friends,
We are delighted to unveil our 2022 Fall Fiction Rights List.
We will be attending the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. Do send us an e-mail should you wish to book an appointment!
You can also drop by our stand at Hall 4.1 C30.
Don’t forget to peek in our 2022 Fall Non-Fiction Rights List.
We very much looking forward to hearing from you!
The Rights Team
LITERARY RENTRÉE
Highlights
When 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 Germany (Aufbau), Italy (Einaudi, preempt), the Netherlands (De Arbeiderspers, at auction), Slovakia (Inaque) and Spain (Alianza, WSL, at auction).
Option in China (Haitian), Japan (Hayakawa), 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 hereHomage to Ukraine
Collective
Fiction - October 2022 - 176 pages
Rights sold to Ukraine (Knigolove).
A collection of unpublished texts by fourteen Ukrainian authors describing Ukraine before, during and after war.
On 24th February 2022, when the Russian army invaded Ukraine, the whole world was profoundly shocked and saddened. Names that we’d hardly known – Bucha, Mariupol, Kharkiv, Dnipro and plenty more – started flooding our media and were associated with tragedy.
But what do we really know about this neighbouring country? Do we know that Ukraine is also a country with a thousand-year-old culture, the cradle of all Russian literature in the Twelfth Century, and can currently boast a buzzing literary scene that isn’t yet sufficiently recognised abroad?
In this collection, authors of all ages and from every background and region (Russian-speakers and Ukrainian-speakers alike) describe what symbolises “their” Ukraine. Among its protagonists we discover the village of Bakota in the Ternopil region, Polesia, and the Trakhtemyriv peninsula, as well as the city of Odessa, the Crimea and Kriukivshchyna, one of the prosperous suburbs to the west of Kyiv. This collection of unpublished texts allows the reader to understand contemporary Ukraine through literature.
The author
Katerina Babkina (1985), Lyubko Deresh (1984), Irena Karpa (1980), Boris Khersonsky (1950), Andrey Kurkov (1961), Anastasia Levkova (1986), Andriy Lyubka (1987), Oleksandr Mykhed (1988), Taras Prokhasko (1968), Volodymyr Rafeienko (1969), Artem Chekh (1985), Lyuba Yakimchuk (1985), Petro Yatsenko (1978) and Tais Zolotkovska (1984).
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Click hereHow Do People Do?
Olivia de Lamberterie
Novel - August 2022 - 272 pages
A fiercely funny novel that immerses the reader in the turbulent day of a modern woman.
Working as an editor under a dictator, Anna fights her corner, holds her ground and rolls with the punches. Between work pressures, a fight with her evasive husband, trying to juggle her three woke teenagers’ education, and frequent visits to her dementia-patient mother in a care home, Anna mirrors our own lives and copes with hers as best she can, in other words – badly.
We follow her stream of consciousness, endlessly interrupted by the warning bell of text messages and emergency anti-burn-out drinks. She wishes she could yell, “Stop everything!” but that only works in movies. How do people do it?
In this inimitable blend of offbeat humour, observation of a manic day-to-day existence, and raw emotion, the author gives us a perfectly accurate novel about our society, seen through one woman’s eyes.
The author
The literary critic Olivia de Lamberterie oversees the book pages of French Elle and is the author of an acclaimed first book that won the Prix Renaudot for an essay, Avec toutes mes sympathies (2018), which sold nearly 80,000 copies.
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Click hereDebut Novel
In a Faraway Kingdom
Amina Richard
Novel - August 2022 - 216 pages
Inspired by fairy tales, this rite-of-passage story explores questions of descendance and mixed races.
A young mixed-race woman raised by her white mother in the ‘70s sets out to find her father in Senegal. She is driven by the unstoppable impulsion of a stubborn four-year-old filled with children’s stories and expectations, and who refuses to grow up until he recognises her as his daughter.
But she finds everything in Senegal disconcerting: the way her father greets her, the strangers who make up her family circle, the places, smells, smiles, words… She arrives as a foreigner in a country not her own and needs to adapt significantly to become integrated.
What sense can she make of this fragmented existence? Is our private truth written in a faraway kingdom, as it is in fairy tales, and must we travel there to find it?
The author
Amina Richard lives in the South of France. Dans un royaume lointain is her first novel.
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Click hereGeneral Fiction
A Brief Liberation
Félicité Herzog
Longlisted for the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française 2022
Novel - August 2022 - 360 pages
An impossible love story set during World War II.
She is Marie-Pierre de Cossé-Brissac, a young aristocrat spending the German occupation at her parents’ house. Their private mansion plays host to the high society of occupied Paris. Marie-Pierre grows up in this closed world, keeping her disapproval to herself and looking for a way out.
He is Simon Nora, a young Jewish idealist who flees Paris and takes refuge with Resistance fighters in the Vercors. The intellectual raised on cerebral jousting learns to shoot and fight in woodland. At the end of the war, as the sole survivor of a massacre, he returns surrounded by the aura of his courage.
Marie-Pierre and Simon meet at the Liberation of Paris. They are different in every way but will love each other, despite everything and everyone.
The author
Born in Boulogne-Billancourt, Félicité Herzog is the author of Un héros (Grasset, 2012), an autobiographical novel that enjoyed critical and popular success (100,000 copies sold), and a second novel published by Gallimard, Gratis (2015).
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Click hereThe Mediterraneans
Emmanuel Ruben
Novel - August 2022 - 416 pages
Rights sold to Italy (Astarte) and Serbia (Akademska Knjiga)
Once upon a time there was a Menorah…
December 2017, a suburb of Lyon. Samuel Livdweiss is reunited with his mother’s family for a Hanukkah dinner around a menorah said to have belonged to Kahina, a Berber Jewish queen.
Samuel decides to trace its origins and flies to Constantine. He also hopes to meet up with Djamila, who he met in Paris on the night of the 2015 bomb attacks and who left to fight the revolution and bring an end to Bouteflika’s Algeria. Past and present are interwoven as he explores the streets of Constantine, Guelma and Annaba. In the place where his grandmother was married, where his grandfather committed suicide, where his mother was born, where his aunt set sail for Marseille…
Back in France, he keeps on questioning the women in his family and, through their recollections, he understands where he is from. Beyond his complex identity (with Berber heritage, Jewish religion, Arab language, and French citizenship), what emerges is a sense of belonging to one geographic community: the Mediterranean. A community of past and present exiles.
The author
Born in Lyon in 1980, Emmanuel Ruben has written some ten books – novels, narrative non-fiction and essays – including Sur la route du Danube (2019 prix Nicolas Bouvier) and Sabre (2021 prix des Deux-Magots). His Nouvelles ukrainiennes will be published simultaneously in the Fall of 2022 by Points Seuil.
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Click hereBeyrouth-upon-the Seine
Sabyl Ghoussoub
Longlisted fo the Prix Goncourt 2022
Novel - August 2022 - 309 pages
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 hereGraphic Novel
The Office of Gardens and Ponds
Didier Decoin & Julia Bourdet
Graphic novel - October 2022 - 224 pages
STOCK’S FIRST GRAPHIC NOVEL ADAPTATION.
Stock releases its first graphic novel adaptation with Didier Decoin’s exceptional book: over 100,000 copies sold in France and translated into 14 languages!
The Japanese Empire, Twelfth Century.
After the sudden death of her husband Katsuro, a carp fisher who supplied the sacred ponds in the imperial city, Miyuki must take over from him, carrying these beautiful fish with their dazzling scales to the capital. Wearing simple straw sandals and stooped under a yoke bearing creels of living fish, Miyuki leaves her village for the first time and embarks on a journey across forests and mountains. Along the way, she travels from temples to brothels, and battles through storms and earthquakes, the betrayal of thieves and the cruelty of brothel keepers, but also the fury of kappas, aquatic monsters that leap out of the water to feast on the entrails of travelers.
Using power and poetry, ink and colour, this book reintroduces Didier Decoin’s great novel and his unforgettable heroine Miyuki through Julia Bourdet’s sublime illustrations. To take readers into the different atmospheres, smells and landscapes of this story, each section has its own specific colour palette.
The authors
Born in 1945, Didier Decoin is an author and scriptwriter. He was twenty when his first book was published, and it was followed by another twenty titles including Abraham de Brooklyn (winner of the prix des Libraires), and John l’Enfer which won the 1977 prix Goncourt.
Julia Bourdet is an illustrator, scriptwriter, and graphic designer. Le Bureau des Jardins et des Étangs is her first book.
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Click hereRECENT BESTSELLER
Fiction
Adapting
Clara Dupont-Monod
OVER 250 000 COPIES SOLD!
Prix Femina 2021
Prix Goncourt des Lycéens 2021
Prix Landerneau des lecteurs 2021
Prix Goncourt de l’Orient 2021
Prix Goncourt du Japon 2022
Prix Goncourt de l’Algérie 2022
Novel - August 2021 - 176 pages
Rights sold to Brazil (Dublinense), China (Yilin Press), Croatia (Znanje, at auction), Germany (Piper, at auction), Greece (Psichogios), Hungary (General Press, at auction), Israel (Kinneret, at auction), Italy (Clichy), Japan (Hayakawa, at auction), Korea (Feelmbook, at auction), the Netherlands (Meulenhoff, at auction), Poland (Znak), Portugal (Presença, at auction), Russia (Polyandra No Age), Saudi Arabia (Dar Athar WAL, at auction), Spain (Salamandra – Castillan / Les Hores – Catalan), Taiwan (Marco Polo), Turkey (Iletisim) and United Kingdom (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, it is the story 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.
The author
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.
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Click hereFeral
Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba
Novel - January 2022 - 368 pages
Rights sold to Germany (DTV, 5-figure deal), Italy (Lindau), the Netherlands (Prometheus, 5-figure deal, at auction), Spain (Minúscula editorial), Sweden (Editions J) and UK (Mountain Leopard Press).
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, Feral 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, Feral 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.
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 a first novel Encabanée, rights to which have been sold in France, Germany and Italy.
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Click hereNarrative Non-Fiction
The Sky Inside Us
Jakuta Alikavazovic
Prix Médicis-Essay 2021
Narrative Non-Fiction/Art - September 2021 - 160 pages
Sold to Germany (Carl Hanser Verlag), the US (Fern Books) and Spain (Muñeca Rusa).
Jakuta Alikavazovic at the Louvre! Intimately surrounded by classic masterpieces, she reveals her roots.
Imagine a night alone with the greatest treasures in French heritage. The novelist spent this night wandering around the Ancient World sections, with a bag slung across her shoulders containing, amongst other things, an illicit bar of nougat. This personal and original book is peopled with nocturnal shadows and ghosts of the past, and the glide of bare feet past the Venus de Milo.
But Alikavazovic soon explains her intention: “I came here tonight to become my father’s daughter again.” Her father was born in 1951, in a village in Montenegro, which was then part of Yugoslavia. Without a word of French, he came to Paris out of love, to escape, and to see the Louvre. He sees the museum as a city within a city. This exiled father, a scavenger-aesthete, once strolled casually around the Louvre with his daughter Jakuta and asked her, “So, how would you go about stealing the Mona Lisa?”
The author
A novelist and translator of English born in 1979, Jakuta Alikavazovic won the 2008 Prix Goncourt for a first novel for Corps volatils. La Blonde et le Bunker received a special merit in the Prix Wepler. Her most significant translations have been into English with Granta.
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Click hereA Smell of Flowers in the Night
Leïla Slimani
Over 100.000 copies sold
Narrative Non-Fiction/Art - January 2021 - 160 pages
Rights sold to Germany (Luchterhand/Random House), Brazil (Casa dos Livros), Portugal (Objectiva), Italy (La Nave di Teseo), Korea (Mujintree), Slovakia (Inaque), Spain (Cabaret Voltaire), 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.
The author
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.
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