Head of Rights
For German, Dutch, Greek, Middle Eastern, North African, Scandinavian, Turkish, UK and US inquiries
Foreign Rights Manager
For Asian, Brazilian, Eastern Europe, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, South American and Spanish inquiries
Dear friends,
We are delighted to unveil our 2023 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 the Hall 5, stand E21.
Don’t forget to peek in our 2023 Fall Non-Fiction Rights List.
We very much looking forward to hearing from you!
The Rights Team
Maria Pourchet
Shortlisted for the Prix Renaudot and longlisted for the Prix de Flore
Rights sold in Germany (Luchterhand), Israel (Hakibbutz Hameuchad), Italy (Rizzoli) and Slovakia (Inaque).
Under option in Czech Republic (Euromedia) and Korea (Gimm Young).
A claustrophobic love story rewritten following the codes of a Western.
Aurore is a single mother in Paris, racing between meetings – with her son’s headmistress, her well-connected line-managers and, on her break, a lover. She’s functioning for now, but a Western is waiting for her with outstretched arms. When she implodes, she and her son take refuge in her mother’s empty family home on an arid limestone plateau in southwest France.
Alexis Zagner is the “face of the century”, a famous actor embarking on a defining performance in a new scripting of Don Juan. He can tell that times are changing and his all-consuming desire for the extremely young aspiring actress Chloé hasn’t gone unnoticed. His instincts urge him to make a rapid exit and he too heads west.
While a media storm brews, Aurore and Alexis start to confront each other but it’s not clear who will be the good guy in the white Stetson and who the outlaw in the black one.
A full gallop of a novel carried by dazzling writing. With humour that perfectly matches her feel for tragedy, Maria Pourchet delivers a profound reflection on our era, its violence and vulnerabilities and its language of love.
Maria Pourchet is a novelist. She is best know for Rome en un jour (2013), Toutes les femmes sauf une (winner of the 2018 SGDL Prix Révélation) and Feu (2021) which has been translated into five languages.
Dorothée Janin
A confrontation between the past and present illuminated by the lives of forgotten subversive women.
Thieves, runaways, vagabonds and harlots – the women of the Fresnes prison mutiny. On 6th May 1947 they break down doors, smash windows, raid the stores, gorge themselves on chocolate and jam, climb the prison walls and end up occupying the roof. They hold out for many hours. Still behind bars, the male prisoners cheer them on. It takes 120 police officers to get them down. The press run with the story for a while, describing the event as “collective hysteria” and, sentenced a second time, the rebels return to the anonymity of their cells. These nameless she-devils and voiceless troublemakers are forgotten by posterity.
Until the day when the formidable lawyer Serge Valère decided to unravel the threads of his origins. Valère had never known his father and hired the genealogist Elvire Horta to trace his mother, Madeleine, who abandoned him. Horta discovers that Madeleine was one of the Fresnes mutineers: 1947 is brought face to face with the present when Madeleine and Horta meet.
In strong, passionate prose, Dorothée Janin brings to life the violence, rebellion and fleeting freedom of these women who were once forgotten.
Dorothée Janin’s previous books include La vie sur terre (2007,
shortlisted for the prix de Flore), Mickey Mouse Rosenberger et autres
égarés (2010) and L’Île de Jacob (2020) which won the Prix Maison
Rouge. La révolte des filles perdues is her third novel.
Panayotis Pascot
OVER 150.000 COPIES SOLD!
A mordant exploration of family ties and self-construction.
Are you familiar with Schopenhauer’s Hedgehog Dilemma? In cold weather, young hedgehogs try to huddle together to share body heat… but they have to keep their distance to avoid hurting one another with their spines.
Like them, the narrator tries to get close to his family – particularly his father – but he can’t do this without causing damage. Scouring through the last three years, he tackles the inescapable reasons for this: the news that his overbearing, ever-present father is incurably ill, the discovery that he himself is homosexual and the process of accepting himself, and his descent into depression.
With acerbic, pared-down prose, this gripping book propels us into universal questions that affect all young people coping with the need to complete their own metamorphosis.
Panayotis Pascot is a successful writer and comedian. After a two-year career in the French TV shows Petit Journal and Quotidien, he tried his hand at stand-up with Almost, available on Netflix. La prochaine fois que tu mordras la poussière is his debut novel.
Olivia Elkaim
The portrait of an indomitable woman whose forced exile sends her into a hellish vortex.
Olivia has always been intrigued by her grandmother Arlette’s scandalous life. Why did her mother turn her back on this inheritance when Arlette died? Ten years later, Olivia is consumed with memories and unspoken truths. She decides to delve into the past to understand her life.
She sees her grandmother in a new light: an indomitable woman living the dolce vita in 1950s Tunis. There Arlette meets her future husband, Sauveur, a handsome gunner originally from Sicily, and she believes she’s found freedom with him. But at the end of the French protectorate, she is forced to leave Tunisia for France, leaving her husband behind.
Exiled, far from the world she knows and rejected by society, she tries to rebuild her life in 1960s Marseille. In this masculine environment, she wants to break free of the women’s roles imposed on her and is soon caught up in a giddying spiral of alcohol and gambling, of deep debt and creditors.
But what was it that made her daughters turn their backs and draw a line under her life? Olivia’s research takes us on a journey through time between the two shores of the Mediterranean.
Olivia Elkaim is a novelist and journalist. Fille de Tunis is her seventh novel.
Luc Lang
Option in Italy (Clichy), Oman (Prose) and Romania (Minerva).
A family quest, crossed by the fights one carries out and its lessons.
In this bildungsroman, the narrator ventures into a journey over half a century, from Europe to Asia via Africa.
He is the son of a protective mother, capable of imposing her wishes on the world and a father who was a judo pioneer in France, but also obsessed with legacy. As a novelist and karateka, the narrator wanders through the different stages of his life, remembering all his falls and how he overcame them. Falls that have forged the life of an adult who is still standing.
Living is both hazardous and a fight. A fight whose grammar, discipline and art we discover here.
Luc Lang has written a dozen books including Mille six cents ventres (winner of the Prix Goncourt des lycéens), La Fin des paysages, Mother, Au commencement du septième jour (over 50,000 copies sold) and La tentation (winner of 2019 Prix Medicis).
Cédric Sapin-Defour
Shortlisted for the Prix Renaudot-Essai
OVER 130.000 COPIES SOLD!
Rights sold to China (Shenzhen PH), Czech Republic (Dobrosky), Germany (Insel Verlag) and Italy (Salani).
Offer in Czech Republic and China
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.
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, Espresso (published by Guérin), and L’Art de la Trace (Transboréal).
Philippe Claudel
OVER 60.000 COPIES SOLD!
Rights sold to Italy (Ponte Alle Grazie), the Netherlands (De Bezige Bij), Spain (Salamandra for Castillan, Angle for Catalan) and Taiwan (Ecus).
Option in Croatia (Bozicevic), 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.
A writer whose work has been translated all over the world, Philippe
Claudel is also a filmmaker and playwright. Stock has published his
acclaimed books Les Âmes
grises, La Petite Fille de Monsieur Linh, Le Rapport de Brodeck, L’Arbre du
pays Toraja, L’Archipel du Chien and Crépuscule He is secretary general of the Académie Goncourt, and
lives in Lorraine where he was born in 1962.
Jean-Luc Coatalem
Option in Spain (AdN)
Deep in the Guimet Museum, the author reels between different Asian enticements, confiding us a powerful sensory odyssey.
Why the Guimet Museum, devoted to Asian arts? It was to this exotic museum with its fertile stories and secrets from distant lands that Jean-Luc Coatalem’s grandfather came at weekends in the hopes of diluting his melancholia.
The museum will always be a special place for the author too. Cocooned by treasures from the likes of China, Indochina, southern India, Tibet, Japan and Afghanistan, he’s reminded of his childhood in Singapore. When the sandstone Buddhas, winged dragons and armies of Samurais are shrouded in darkness, they seem to come to life, frightening this lone visitor.
Over the course of this account, the line between the real and the imaginary blurs and Jean-Luc Coatalem starts to lose his bearings. But he decides to play on this disorientation and is eventually reconciled with his childhood.
Jean-Luc Coatalem is a writer and journalist whose most acclaimed books published by Stock are Mes pas vont ailleurs, about Victor Segalen and winner of the Prix Femina for an essay and the Prix de la Langue française; and La part du fils, shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Renaudot.
Andrea Marcolongo
Rights sold to Italy (Einaudi), Greece (Patakis), Spain (Taurus/Penguin Random House) and UK & US (Europa Editions).
Option in Slovenia (Athenaeum).
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.”
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.
Christophe Boltanski
Rights sold to Italy (ADD Editore) 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 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).