French Corner

They find the boy by the swimming pool, dolls floating on its surface.

Inside the house, his teacher lies dead.

But he claims to remember nothing...

June 2010. In the middle of a World Cup match, Martin Servaz receives a call from a long-lost lover. A few miles away in the town of Marsac, Classics professor Claire Diemar has been brutally murdered.

As if that weren't disturbing enough, Servaz receives a cryptic e-mail indicating that Julian Hirtmann, the most twisted of all serial killers, is back...and hitting a little too close to home. With death and chaos surrounding the small university town in Southern France where he was once a student and where his daughter is now enrolled, Servaz must act quickly.

With the help of detectives Irene Ziegler and Esperandieu, Servaz will have to uncover a world of betrayal and depravity to connect the dots between these gruesome murders that keep re-opening wounds from his past. After the success of The Frozen Dead, Bernard Minier plunges readers once again into a perfectly constructed, dark and oppressive atmosphere, driven foreward by a gripping plot, pushing the limits of the genre.

Winner of the Prix Goncourt (France), the Leipzig Prize (Germany), Premio Von Rezzori (Italy), shortlisted for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award

As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East.

With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition, Mathias Énard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sources--nineteenth-century composers and esoteric orientalists, Balzac and Agatha Christie--and binds them together in a most magical way.

A young artist pursues a search for knowledge through the treatment of homosexuality and the collapse of morality in middle class France.

The crew of a French reconnaissance plane during WW1 consisted of just two men: a pilot and an observer. Two such men are Jean Herbillon and Claude Maury. Herbillon's dreams of glory as an air ace have been dashed after only a few months at the front; Maury suffers from a broken heart--his only hope is that his exploits as a pilot will win back his lost love. Together the two form one of the best crews in the air, fighting in the first aerial conflict in history--one in which a combatant can count his life expectancy in weeks. The pressure of war forges a strong bond between the two flyers, but can it survive the discovery that they are both in love with the same woman?

Joseph Kessel's autobiographical novel is a staggering tale of courage, brotherhood and loss.

In sixteen ferocious short stories French author Luc Lang encapsulates the brutality of everyday life. Each tale is an admixture of tragedy, comedy, ridicule, and pain. Compassion lurks somewhere, perhaps, but pity is conspicuous by its absence.

Lang's curt, agitated prose disassembles daily life with a swift, unflinching hand and examines it with a sharp, analytic eye. Skinning quotidian moments to bare, raw impulses, confusions, and the agonies underneath, the stories in Cruel Tales from the Thirteenth Floor show the mundane grind of the everyday forces that are fueled by cruel calculation and amoral happenstance and shot through with bizarre surprise. The results are at once coldly comic and powerfully tragic.

Interpreting human interactions as a series of precise jabs and desperate flailings, Cruel Tales from the Thirteenth Floor tells truths about the darker sides of our potential and our well-meaning urges dimmed by chance.