Marie Marzouk, an artist in her middle years, disappears inexplicably during a performance. Her diary recounts, like a countdown, her final months. But slipped between the pages of the diary are mysterious sheets of paper narrating, in a strange language, the tale of a besieged city whose enemy remains unseen. Wandering the city streets is Hyacinthe, who has decided to stay behind and care for a flock of geese.

Phoebe Hadjimarkos Clarke’s most recent novel, Aliène, was a lush fantastical experimental read and Le livre des souterrains is a worthy follow-up.

Le livre des souterrains comes out August 20th from Les Editions du Sous-Sol.

Arun Kumar possesses an absolute palate and a memory for aromas so infallible that it borders on the miraculous. He intends to use this extraordinary gift as a tool for his revenge. It remains to be seen how—and against whom. From the slums of Delhi to the cellars of Burgundy, from the Marquesas Islands to the skyscrapers of Manhattan, François-Henri Désérable’s Le Palais is a grand adventure novel about wine—a portrait of an outlaw genius whose crimes are meant to be savored.

Le Palais comes out August 20th from Gallimard.

On the last day of a literary festival in Beirut, Elisa Shua Dusapin travels to southern Lebanon. She doesn’t know what’s happening across the border in Israel; it’s early in the morning on October 7, 2023. A few months later, after returning to Europe, a gut feeling compels her to rush back to the Middle East. She begins by settling in Amman, Jordan. She knows neither the city nor its culture. The young woman learns Arabic, gets an introduction to plumbing from Jordanian women, befriends Syrian refugees, and shares fleeting confidences with Palestinians and Israelis. A kind of secret unfolds in the silences and through gestures. It is as if Elisa Shua Dusapin wrote this luminous and serious text—which eschews all Manichaeism and offers a fresh perspective on this region and on violence—in the company of these people, rather than about them.

Sauf la frontière comes out on August 27th from Editions Zoé.

Waldo reluctantly agrees to go to the party his mother—a best-selling author—is throwing on the peninsula. Six hundred hectares of freedom, the leeward dunes, the deserted coves. Every summer since childhood, Waldo and his brother Adam would meet up there with the Wilberforce sisters: Annabel, the ringleader, and Olivia, the more secretive one. Among themselves, they called each other the “cosmic twins.” But adolescence put an end to their happiness. Ten years have passed. As night falls, the party turns into a theater of revelations, where everyone must face up to what they’ve done, ignored, or kept hidden.

La dernière des Wildberforce is a turbulent and fascinating novel about lost loves, motherhood, violence, responsibility, the need for redemption, and the desire for freedom.

La dernière des Wilberforce comes out August 20th from Editions de l’Iconoclaste.

“This was the land of my happiness. That feeling needed no explanation; it was an intuition, an acceptance, and the lingering memory of the happy days of childhood when, lying on the lush lawn still drenched with dew, I would listen to the rustling of the wind in the trees. On the verge of tears, my heart already ached at the sight of such effortless joy. I learned later, as I came to terms with absence, that the places we love help us endure great sorrow. They heal, and the sea, wherever it may be, brings comfort. The sea always brings comfort.”

Right after his grandmother has passed away, the narrator reunites with his family at the Breton house of his childhood. Shortly afterward, the house is put up for sale. Caught between a sense of dispossession and the unease caused by the new occupants, a threat now looms over the land of summers.

Le pays des étés comes out August 13th from Gallimard.

The king is dead, long live the king! When Louis XI kicks the bucket, all eyes turn to his son Charles. But he’s still at an age when he’d rather skip stones across the nearby pond than rule France. So attention shifts to his sister, Anne. The king is dead, long live… the queen? The new regent finds herself at the helm of a kingdom in crisis, whose vassals are beginning to stir. At their head, Louis d’Orléans conspires in the shadows, hoping to reclaim the crown; Charles, for his part, spends his time poring over grimoires, believing he has found his divine mission within them; finally, the demands of a French people exhausted by wars and the plague grow ever louder—and in the midst of it all, Anne is slowly developing a taste for power.

Thomas Roy tells the story of Charles VIII, Anne de Beaujeu, and the others in a poetic and theatrical fable—biting and joyfully anachronistic. A bloodbath among selfish little kings, with a fiercely familiar air.

Furia comes out August 26th from Editions Les Léonides.

A young girl, at the foot of her apartment building, is practicing against a wall. She hits the ball with her racket, tirelessly, to escape the madness of her country and her family, to flee her father’s anger, her mother’s chaotic love, and her sister’s pallor. She hits the ball, and inside her, words jostle for space: she stumbles upon a mistake she must confess in order to grow up and dream of the woman she will become—a woman who will love herself and others, who will have earned her own self.

Nina Bouraoui has written a spellbinding, hypnotic novel—the confession of a young girl ablaze with passion, who possesses a gift for words and a gaze that captures every emotion to explore it, every gesture to express desire and beauty.

Championne comes out August 19th from J.C. Lattès.

While stopping over in Nouméa, Emmie, a maritime writer and painter, meets Phuong, a French teacher and avid swimmer—an “amphibian.” It’s friendship at first sight. Emmie returns to Paris, where she lives and where her studio is located. A correspondence that reads like a friendship journal unfolds across the pages, until January 29, 2023, when Phuong is attacked by a shark. She survives what she insists on calling “the accident,” but her condition is critical. Transported to Australia for treatment, she begins a long period of recovery. Their companionship continues in a state of unexpected tranquility, without this life force ever falling into the trap of resilience.

Amphibienne comes out September 3rd from Les Editions du Sous-Sol.

In Le Bouchon, a small, isolated village on the island of Mauritius, four generations have succeeded one another since the days of slavery. Violence mingles with love, tenderness with hatred, the noblest passions with the basest vices, the blood of some with the blood of others.

The five founders come from a distant plantation: three were born into the powerful, white Dumontais family; two to a Black slave. But the three white children are in fact the product of a passionate affair between Madame and Vieux Bouc, a charismatic slave who also claims paternity of the last two. Banished for having formed bonds of love and friendship, the five children, now grown, find refuge in this remote place, which they turn into their own kingdom—self-sufficient and magical—and which they defend as one, for here the boundaries between past, present, and future; life and death; reality and fantasy are abolished.

Chronique d’un royaume perdu comes out August 19th from Grasset.

“What else is it about? An exhibition commissioned from a visual artist. He carries out the commission, but in the end, there’s nothing to see at the exhibition. How did that happen? Who dared to make the works disappear? The artist himself. He deliberately steps back into the shadow of a storyteller. Because rather than showing his works, he asks someone else to tell their story. So there’s a story, instead of the objects.”

By turns playful, digressive, and moving, Gaëlle Obiégly’s novel never ceases to surprise us and to explore the desire for art that runs through our lives.

Rien à voir comes out on August 20th from Verticales.