This fall, we look forward to a series of rich and thought-provoking conversations centered on Élisabeth by Éric Rohmer (tr. Aaron Kerner, McNally Editions); The Deserters by Mathias Énard (tr. Charlotte Mandell, New Directions); The Old Fire by Elisa Shua Dusapin (tr. Aneesa Abbas Higgins, Summit Books); and In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin (tr. Sophie R. Lewis, New York Review Books).

This new lineup invites you on a journey through the Francophone world—exploring its diverse cultures, histories, and literary voices, both classic and contemporary. Each month, take a break from your routine and connect with fellow readers from across the United States. The Albertine Book Club offers a welcoming space for conversation, discovery, and community among Francophiles.

Moderated by the Albertine team, the Book Club is open to all Albertine Constellation members. To learn more about Albertine membership, click here.

Read more about the upcoming selections below.

Tuesday, September 15: Élisabeth by Éric Rohmer (tr. Aaron Kerner, McNally Editions)

Set in the sunstruck countryside east of Paris during the summer of 1939, a year ahead of the German invasion, where the upper-middle-class Roby family and its eponymous matriarch are spending a listless summer, Élisabeth is a war-novel awaiting a war. While the teenage Roby children and their friends swim, flirt, and lie to one another among the baking fields and icy meanders of the Marne, the novel becomes the scene of an anticipatory haunting. The simmering paranoia, calculated blankness, and potential violence of the coming Occupation are already present—as it were, in mufti. With a cool, kaleidoscopic eye, Rohmer lays out his protagonists and their precarious peace—their restlessness, their desperate boredom, their petty romantic agonies—with the unsettling chilliness and the sinister exactitude of details on a tactical map.

Thursday, October 8: The Deserters by Mathias Énard (tr. Charlotte Mandell, New Directions)

The winner of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize 2026 and longlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize, The Deserters is a triumphant novel that balances the weight of love and politics, loyalty and belief, hope and survival.

A filthy and exhausted soldier emerges from the Mediterranean wilderness. He is escaping from an unspecified war, trying to flee incessant violence and find refuge in solitude, but a chance encounter with a civilian forces him to make a difficult decision. On September 11, 2001, aboard a small cruise ship, a scientific conference in honoring the East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a committed communist and anti-fascist and a survivor of Buchenwald.

Tuesday, November 3: The Old Fire by Elisa Shua Dusapin (tr. Aneesa Abbas Higgins, Summit Books)

Agathe leaves New York and returns to her home in the French countryside, after fifteen years away.

She and her sister Véra have not seen each other in all those years, and they carry the weight of their own complicated lives. But now their father has died, and they must confront their childhood home on the outskirts of a country estate ravaged by a nearby fire before it is knocked down. They have nine days to empty it. As the pair clean and sift through a lifetime’s worth of belongings, old memories, and resentments surface.

Tender and tense, haunting and evocative, The Old Fire is Elisa Shua Dusapin’s most personal and moving novel yet. An exploration of time and memory, of family and belonging, it is also a graceful and profound look at the unsaid and the unanswered, the secrets that remain, and whether you can ever really go home again.

Tuesday, December 1: In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin (tr. Sophie R. Lewis, New York Review Books)

In the Eye of the Wild begins with an account of the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s near fatal run-in with a Kamchatka bear in the mountains of Siberia. Martin’s professional interest is animism; she addresses philosophical questions about the relation of humankind to nature, and in her work she seeks to partake as fully as she can in the lives of the indigenous peoples she studies. Her violent encounter with the bear, however, brings her face-to-face with something entirely beyond her ken—the untamed, the nonhuman, the animal, the wild. In the course of that encounter something in the balance of her world shifts. A change takes place that she must somehow reckon with.

Left severely mutilated, dazed with pain, Martin undergoes multiple operations in a provincial Russian hospital, while also being grilled by the secret police. Back in France, she finds herself back on the operating table, a source of new trauma. She realizes that the only thing for her to do is to return to Kamchatka. She must discover what it means to have become, as the Even people call it, medka, a person who is half human, half bear.