- Debut / New Talents
- Woman’s voices
- Bestsellers
- THE BEAUTY OF THE SKY, Sarah Biasini
- LOVER’S DIARY, Benoîte Groult & Paul Guillemard
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Dear friends,
Here we are again for a new digital season ! We will hold an on-line Spring Rights festival, together with all Hachette imprints around the world from March 8 to 19. Do not hesitate to contact us, should you wish to settle an appointment.
Meanwhile, we are delighted to share our Spring Fiction rights list:
Thank for your kind trust.
We very much look forward to meeting you soon !
You can also check our Spring Non Fiction rights list.
The Rights Team
Our Spring Highlights - Watch the trailers!
NOVELS
Debut / New Talents
A Heart on a Leash
Line Papin
Novel - March 2021 - 342 pages
Can you fall in love and lose yourself for a woman who’s not your type?
Maurice is a successful writer. But now that he’s forty he feels nothing – nothing for his partner and nothing for his books. As he makes one last attempt to save his relationship, she appears, out of nowhere: Ambroisie. She is the muse of Paris high-society and a stunning former model, she speaks eloquently and knows everything about everything. The author finds himself wearing designer shirts in a whirl of high-profile launch parties; his identity gradually disappears in Ambroisie’s sublime but troubling embrace. Drowned in all the glamour, under the bright lights of Paris, Maurice neglects his books to live a romance he could never write.
A story of power and fascination.
The author
Born in Hanoï in 1995, Line Papin grew up in the city till the age of ten, before moving to France. At only 25, she already has three critically acclaimed novels to her name..
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Click hereStar of the Frontiers
Alfred de Montesquiou
Debut /Adventure - March 2021 - 336 pages
Longlisted for the Prix du Livre Orange
Imagine travelling on foot across the Lebanon-Syria border in one of the world’s most dangerous regions.
The author
Alfred de Montesquiou is a war correspondent and drew on his first-hand experiences when writing this novel. He has crossed this extremely dangerous, stowaway’s border several times himself.
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Click hereThe Day my Mother told me Everything
Philippa Motte
Debut - May 2021 - 224 pages
A woman is locked up by her husband. Is she mad? Or has a disturbing secret been silenced?
It was raining that day. Raining on the car in which an unhappy, rebellious Lili felt suffocated. In front of her were the gates of a psychiatric hospital. Her husband Hector told her it was the only solution for her. Hector, whom everyone admired, Hector who knew what to think and what to inflict on others. Lili’s life turned upside down. And yet, within those walls, she met wonderful, extraordinary, endearing people. Particularly Antonin. Most significantly, within those walls were the much-needed pages of a private diary which reconnected Lili with her secrets, her pain and the village in Corsica where she was born, where everything was known and everything was kept quiet.
The author
In this partly autobiographical novel, Philippa Motte relates a family psychodrama whose tragic outcome cast a shadow over her childhood. At 20, she had a psychotic episode and was sent to Saint-Anne. Other episodes followed until she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She slowly rebuilt her life, put together her personality, and overcame the storms. Now a specialist in mental health in the workplace, she is a member of the mental illness committee at the Fondation de France and works as a coach for people affected by mental illness.
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Click hereWoman's voices
Battles
Alexia Stresi
Novel/ New Talent - January 2021 - 288 pages
What do small news stories tell us about our lives?
There’s a before and an after in Rose’s life. Everything changed when she was twenty-seven, the day her mother went missing. A voluntary disappearance, according to the police.
Brigitte wrote only three sentences when she left, one of them devastating: “Rose darling, if you love me as much as I love you, don’t look for me.” She also said she would be back very soon. That was ten years ago.
Rose is doing better now, she’s put herself together again. But a human-interest news story currently rocking the country stirs up a lot of things: a mother surrendered her baby to the waves of a rising tide, then went home and carried on reading her philosophy book.
This incendiary trigger shows Rose that she must disobey her mother and set out to find her.
The author
Alexia Stresi is the author of an acclaimed first novel, Looping, published by Stock in 2017 (winner of the Madame Figaro Grand Prix de l’héroïne), which sold nearly 10,000 copies.
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Click hereTwo little rich girls
Colombe Schneck
Novel - May 2021 - 220 pages
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.
The author
The writer 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.
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Click hereBombshell
Emmanuelle Hutin
Narrative - May 2021 - 240 pages
A bombshell is a stunning, flawless woman, but it’s also a ticking bomb which will eventually explode…
A woman goes through life wanting to tick all the boxes. With her women’s magazines and her share of social instructions under her arm, she bases herself on an unattainable ideal. Career, marriage, family – she needs to juggle it all for herself and her loved ones. But as soon as her first child, her beloved son, is born, she knows something’s not right. She waits apprehensively for impending disaster.
Would a second child be the solution? Once again, motherhood brings overpowering love… but why is she still not happy with her life?
And then comes the first fit, the horror of watching her firstborn twitching and contorting in front of her. A second, then a third fit confirm the diagnosis: epilepsy has intruded into the life of this perfect mother. The seizures become increasingly frequent and intense. Until they consume all of Solal’s energy, and with it the family’s fragile stability.
The author
Emmanuelle Hutin was born in Paris in 1979. At 38, she left a long career in the world of luxury goods in order to write. Her years working at Chanel have left her with a taste for reflecting on beauty, self-fulfilment and the importance of appearances. Alongside her writing, she is a curator and artistic director. She also teaches yoga for charitable organisations.
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Click hereFiction bestsellers
Marguerite
Jacky Durand
Debut - First published in 2017 - New edition in October 2021 - 238 pages
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.
The author
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.
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Click hereA German Fantasia
Philippe Claudel
Novel - September 2020 - 180 pages
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.
The author
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.”
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Click hereThe Great Ordeal
Etienne de Montety
Fiction - August 2020 - 306 pages
Grand Prix de l’Académie française
Rights sold to Italy (E/O Edizioni).
A chilling novel based on real-life events.
An ordinary couple, Laure and François Berteau. Their adopted son, David, a cheerful teenager who wonders about his origins. Father Georges Tellier, a priest with an unyielding fate in a context of clerical decline. Frédéric Nguyen, a cop resolved to action and silence, in order to preserve his private life. Hicham, a reckless show-off who ends up in prison. Hurtful comments, unlucky encounters. A growing influence of Islamism and an ever more radical rage. And everything unravels. Towards this little village church in the southwest of France, tragedy attracts, like an explosive magnet, men who were initially worlds apart.
The author
Etienne de Montéty is at the head of the Figaro littéraire. He has written many novels, including La route du salut (2009, Prix des Deux Magots) and L’amant noir (2013, Prix Jean Freustié)
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Click hereNARRATIVE NON FICTION
In the spotlight
A Smell of Flowers in the Night
Leïla Slimani
Art/Narrative - January 2021 - 120 pages
Already 60.000 copies sold/ Total print-run: 100.000 copies (14 reprints). N°6 on L’Express best-seller list this week.
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. Sl
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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Click hereWomen's Portraits
The One and Only, Maria Casarès
Anne Plantagenet
Biography/Women's Lives - January 2021 - 265 pages
Long-listed for the Prix de l’Héroïne Madame Figaro.
Rights sold to Greece (Patakis) and Spain (Alba Editorial).
The little-known story of Maria Casarès, a Spanish exile in France, actress, free spirit and Albert Camus’s lover.
With her monstrous appetite, raucous laugh and scorching sensuality, Maria Casarès was born and grew up in Galicia, fled Franco in 1936, and came to Paris at 14. She very soon wanted to learn the unforgiving French language, become an actress, express herself physically, dance, love… Nothing could stop her, not rejection from the Conservatoire, nor Paris etiquette. Her talent swiftly earned recognition, and she became one of the greatest tragedians of the second half of the Twentieth Century.
She was also Albert Camus’ “One and only”. They had a sixteen-year relationship, a tormented love kept in the shadows, but it flourished through a fascinating correspondence.
The author
Anne Plantagenet is a writer and a translator of Spanish. She has written more than ten books including Trois jours à Oran, Marylin Monroe, Nation Pigalle and Appelez-moi Lorca Horowitz. By delving into her correspondence and exploring the places she went to, the author gets under the skin of Maria Casarès.
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Click here“A biography that immerses us in the French literary intelligentsia of the post-war years”
“Unputdownable”
Carole & Clark
Vincent Duluc
Narrative Non fiction/ Film - January 2021 - 240 pages
The love story of Hollywood’s most legendary couple: Carole Lombard and Clark Gable.
They were more than movie stars: they were the dream couple, a national soap opera. Between 1930 and 1940, Carole Lombard and Clark Gable embodied a specific notion of happiness. She was glamourous and funny, a straightforward talker who insisted on having things her way. He was the man who kissed women, his aura deriving entirely from a distinctive gesture, the way he gripped his partner by the arm, implying exactly where the power lay, and the electricity.
He was the star of Gone with the Wind, she dazzled in Nothing Sacred, they met on the set of Counsel for Romance. Despite the romantic advances of others, they tried to stay together in an unreal existence that the studios controlled, invented even.
But a plane crash brought an end to their idyll.
The author
Vincent Duluc has had three critically acclaimed works of narrative non-fiction published by Stock: Le Cinquième Beatles, Un printemps 76 and Kornelia. Basing his work in real facts, he retrieves fascinating and unknown stories from oblivion.
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Click here“In their ranch, they slept in separate rooms.
Duluc now reunites them very well”
Love letters
The Beauty of the Sky
Sarah Biasini
Narrative Non fiction/ Biography - January 2021 - 252 pages
50,000 copies sold up-to-date.
N°27 on L’Express best-sellers list this week.
Sold to Germany (Zsolnay, at auction).
Sarah Biasini’s beautifully restrained narrative about her mother Romy Schneider.
A woman writes to her new-born daughter, telling her about her joys, sorrows and fears. Most importantly she describes an absence, the void left by her own mother, Romy Schneider, the unforgettable Sissi who touched fans all over the world.
In a dazzling prose haunted by loss, Sarah Biasini confides in the reader and explores her relationship to motherhood, death and love. This poetic text, with its tide-like rhythms, constantly revisits the same questions: how do you grow up when you lost your mother at the age of four? How do you grieve a mother idolized by the whole world? How do you in turn become a mother?
The author
While still performing as a stage actor, Romy Schneider and Daniel Biasini’s daughter Sarah Biasini has opted for a new mode of expression, writing. La beauté du ciel is her first book.
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Click hereLovers' Diary
Benoîte Groult & Paul Guimard
Diary - March 2021 - 270 pages
Benoît Groult is a major feminist figure. She and her husband, Paul Guimard, invented a formula for lovers: a co-written diary.
Benoîte and Paul are young and in love. Writing plays a key role in Benoîte’s life. She fills the pages of her private diary and keeps up prolific correspondence every day. However, she lacks self-confidence and dare not think of herself as a writer. So, to encourage her writing, Paul comes up with the generous idea of a shared diary, a “lovers’ diary” in which they take turns sharing their day-to-day lives.
The authors
The journalist, novelist and feminist Benoîte Groult (1920-2016) wrote numerous French and international bestsellers, including Salt on My Skin and La Touche étoile.
Paul Guimard (1921-2004) was a journalist and novelist. He loved the sea and travelled around the world several times. He also was cultural adviser to President Mitterrand.
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