McNally Robinson Literary Tour of France

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Beginning with the Roman army's first recorded encounter with the Gauls and ending in the era of Emmanuel Macron, France takes readers on an endlessly entertaining journey through French history. Frequently hilarious, always surprising, Graham Robb's France combines the stylistic versatility of a novelist with the deep understanding of a scholar. Robb's own adventures and discoveries while living, working, and traveling in France connect this tour through space and time with on-the-ground experience. There are scenes of wars and revolutions from the plains of Provence to the slums and boulevards of Paris. Robb conveys with wit and precision what it felt like to look over the shoulder of a young Louis XIV as he planned the vast garden of Versailles, and the dangerous thrill of having a ringside seat at the French revolution. Some of the protagonists may be familiar, but appear here in a very different light--Caesar, Charlemagne, Louis XIV, Napoleon Bonaparte, General Charles de Gaulle. This extraordinary narrative is the fruit of decades of research and thirty thousand miles on a self-propelled, two-wheeled time machine (a bicycle). Even seasoned Francophiles will wonder if they really know that terra incognita on the edge of Europe that is currently referred to as "France."

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'Beautiful and deep ... a sumptuous treat for any book lover' The Independent

'Food for short story lovers everywhere' Irish Times

*A major celebration of the French short story and Spectator Book of the Year*

The short story has a rich tradition in French literature. This feast of an anthology celebrates its most famous practitioners, as well as newly translated writers ready for rediscovery. The first volume spans four hundred years, taking the reader from the sixteenth century to the 'golden age' of the fin de siècle. Its pages are populated by lovers, phantoms, cardinals, labourers, enchanted statues, gentleman burglars, retired bureaucrats, panthers and parrots, in a cacophony of styles and voices. From the affairs of Madame de Lafayette to the polemic realism of Victor Hugo, the supernatural mystery of Guy de Maupassant to the dark sensuality of Rachilde, this is the place to start for lovers of French literature, new and old.

Edited and with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness, academic, writer and translator.

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'Beautiful and deep ... a sumptuous treat for any book lover' The Independent

'Food for short story lovers everywhere' Irish Times

*A major celebration of the French short story and Spectator Book of the Year*

The short story has a rich tradition in French literature. This feast of an anthology celebrates its most famous practitioners, as well as newly translated writers ready for rediscovery. The second volume takes the reader through the tumultuous twentieth century in the company of writers including Simone de Beauvoir and Maryse Condé, Patrick Modiano and Virginie Despentes, covering world wars, revolutions, and the horrors of the motorway service station. Along the way we meet electronic brains, she-wolves, a sadistic Cinderella, ancestors, infidels, dissatisfied housewives and lonely ambassadors, all clamouring to be heard. Funny, devastating and fresh at every turn, this is the place to start for lovers of French literature, new and old.

Edited and with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness, academic, writer and translator.

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Includes The Necklace, Butterball, The Tellier House, On the Water, Mademoiselle Fifi, The Mask, The Inn, A Day in the Country, The Hand, The Jewels, The Model, The Entity (The Horla)

These stories--poignant scrutinies of social pretension, wicked tales of lust and love, and harrowing examinations of terror and madness--display the full genius of Guy de Maupassant in an enthralling new translation by Joachim Neugroschel. They reveal Maupassant's remarkable range, his technical perfection, his sexual realism, and his ability to create whole worlds and sum up intricate universes of feeling in a few pages

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Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which "spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time -- the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain." Winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature (though he declined to accept it), Jean-Paul Sartre -- philosopher, critic, novelist, and dramatist -- holds a position of singular eminence in the world of French letters. La Nausée, his first and best novel, is a landmark in Existential fiction and a key work of the twentieth century.

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In this first installment in Georges Simenon's legendary Inspector Maigret series, M. Maigret hunts down an elusive and notorious confidence man, but finds that identifying him is a game of doubles, intrigue, and hidden crimes.

When Detective Chief Inspector Maigret receives notice from Interpol that Pietr the Latvian, an infamous con man, is on his way to Paris, he rushes to intercept him at the train station. But when he arrives he is confounded to find two men who fit the description of the wanted man. One is alive, the other dead.

So who is Pietr? A businessman or a bootlegger? Is he Latvian, American, or Russian? In order to find out, Maigret must use his keen understanding of human nature, his gift for observation, and his famous instincts to track down the true suspect in Pietr the Latvian, the first mystery in Georges Simenon's iconic series.

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An amnesic searches for his identity, from Polynesia to Rome, in this novel by master storyteller Patrick Modiano: winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Guy Roland is in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation. For ten years, he has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a onetime client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files--directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century--but his leads are few. Could he really be the person in that photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attaché? Or was he someone else, perhaps the disappeared scion of a prominent local family? He interviews strangers and is tantalized by half-clues until, at last, he grasps a thread that leads him through the maze of his own repressed experience.

Published in France as Rue des Boutiques obscures this is both a detective mystery and a haunting meditation on the nature of the self, Patrick Modiano's spare, hypnotic prose, superbly translated by Daniel Weissbort, draws readers into the intoxication of a rare literary experience.

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We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building’s tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.

Then there’s Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma’s trust and to see through Renée’s timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.

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"A love letter to the novel . . . and a profound exploration of human nature."--Library Journal

Ivan and Francesca decide to open a bookstore devoted to their love of books. Tucked away in a corner of Paris, the store offers a selection of literary masterpieces chosen by a top-secret committee of literary connoisseurs. To their amazement the little dream store quickly proves a success. And that is precisely when their troubles begin. At first, both owners shrug off the anonymous threats that come their way and the venomous comments circulating on the Internet, but when three members of the supposedly secret committee are attacked, they decide to call the police. As the pieces of this puzzle fall ominously into place, it becomes increasingly evident that Ivan and Francesca's dreams will be answered with pettiness, envy and violence.

"Charming and compelling and very readable."--Words Without Borders

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"Sexy encounters, irreverent humor, and subtle twists keep up the pace of this quirky tale about a variety of French appetites" (Publishers Weekly).

Sandrine works as a functionary in an employment office, but there is a lot more to her than one might suspect from her job description. With a volcanic personality and an imagination to match, she is also a world-class cook waiting for the right occasion to realize her dream of opening a restaurant of her own. With a master plan that one could only describe as Machiavellian, Sandrine ropes Antoine, an unemployed professor, into her venture. A carousel of extravagant characters follows: the giant Senegalese man, Toussaint N'Diaye; the magical chef, Vairam; the extravagantly flatulent Alsatian Schmutz and his twelve-year-old daughter Juliette (IQ 172!); the alluring psychologist and Kama Sutra specialist Annabelle Villemin-Dubreuil. Plans for the restaurant proceed smoothly until Sandrine discovers a shady newspaper operation next-door that leads her to a sinister magnate's plot . . . Set in the storied and culturally diverse Parisian quarter of Montmartre, made famous by artists, writers, and bon vivants of every ilk, this heartwarming, comic tale is a must for foodies, Francophiles, and lovers of a good story well told.

"This farcical novel envelops readers in the sights, sounds, and smells of Montmartre and is sure to be enjoyed by fans of Mary Simses, Laura Madeleine, and Nina George. With lively characters and a dreamy setting, Little Culinary Triumphs will awaken the Francophile in all."--Booklist

"Pujol keeps the tone light as she takes on serious themes of economics and immigration . . . The plot adds characters like ingredients in a recipe until everything finally sets like a creamy quiche. Will everybody get what they want--or deserve? Maybe, maybe not, but it's fun watching the schemes unfold."--The Star Tribune

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A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
TIME Magazine?NPR?Library Journal?The Globe and Mail?Lilith?Forward Magazine?Toronto Star?The New Yorker


"A testament to the power of imagination and an investigation of empathy."--Vogue

"Stunning."--Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker

"A can't-miss novel."--Chicago Review of Books

"Compelling."--The Washington Examiner

Anne Berest's The Postcard is among the most acclaimed and beloved French novels of recent years. It is at once a gripping investigation into family trauma, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life.

January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest's maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques--all killed at Auschwitz.

Years after the postcard is delivered, the heroine of this novel is moved to discover who sent it and why. What emerges is a moving saga of a family devastated by the travails of the twentieth century and partly restored through the power of storytelling.

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Verne's classic novel of global voyaging

One night in the reform club, Phileas Fogg bets his companions that he can travel across the globe in just eighty days. Breaking the well-established routine of his daily life, he immediately sets off for Dover with his astonished valet Passepartout. Passing through exotic lands and dangerous locations, they seize whatever transportation is at hand - whether train or elephant - overcoming set-backs and always racing against the clock.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

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Four adult siblings reconnect on a brief adventure through the Loire Valley in this international-bestselling novel by the beloved French author of Billie.

Simon and his two sisters, Garance and Lola, flee their cousin's dull wedding--and Simon's judgmental wife--to visit their younger brother, Vincent, who is working as a guide at a château in the heart of the enchanting Tours countryside. For a few hours, they forget about kids, spouses, and work, and lose themselves in a day of laughter, teasing, and memories. Then, as simply and as spontaneously as the adventure began, it ends. All four return to their everyday lives, carrying with them the magic of their brief reunion. They are stronger now, and happier, for having rediscovered the ties that bind them.
Anna Gavalda's international-bestselling novel has been published in more than forty languages. A lighthearted and funny parable about escaping the past to find the future, French Leave is a tribute to sibling relationships, local Loire wines, and the art of being together.

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In 1919, in a small town in the province of Berry, France, under the crushing heat of summer heat wave, a war hero is being held prisoner in an abandoned barracks. In front of the door to his prison, a mangy dog barks night and day. Miles from where he is being held, in the French countryside, a young extraordinarily intelligent woman works the land the land, waiting and hoping. A judge whose principles have been sorely shaken by the war is travelling to an unknown location to sort out certain affairs of which it is better not to speak.
 
Three characters. In their midst, a dog who holds the key both to their destinies and to this intriguing plot.
 
Full of poetry and life, The Red Collar is at once a delightly simple narrative about the human spirit and a profound work about loyalty and love.

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With its vibrant new translation, perceptive introduction, and witty packaging, this new edition of Voltaire's masterpiece belongs in the hands of every reader pondering our assumptions about human behavior and our place in the world. Candide tells of the hilarious adventures of the naïve Candide, who doggedly believes that "all is for the best" even when faced with injustice, suffering, and despair. Controversial and entertaining, Candide is a book that is vitally relevant today in our world pervaded by--as Candide would say--"the mania for insisting that all is well when all is by no means well."

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"I remember the movement of his hips pressing against the pinball machine. This one sentence had me in its grip until the end. Two young men find each other, always fearing that life itself might be the villain standing in their way. A stunning and heart-gripping tale." --André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

The critically acclaimed, internationally beloved novel by Philippe Besson--"this year's Call Me By Your Name" (Vulture) with raves in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Vanity Fair, Vogue, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Out--about an affair between two teenage boys in 1984 France, translated with subtle beauty and haunting lyricism by the iconic and internationally acclaimed actress and writer Molly Ringwald.

In this "sexy, pure, and radiant story" (Out), Philippe chances upon a young man outside a hotel in Bordeaux who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back at the relationship he's never forgotten, a hidden affair with a boy named Thomas during their last year of high school. Thomas is the son of a farmer; Philippe the son of a school principal. At school, they don't acknowledge each other. But they steal time to meet in secret, carrying on a passionate, world-altering affair.

Despite the intensity of their attraction, from the beginning Thomas knows how it will end: "Because you will leave and we will stay," he says. Philippe becomes a writer and travels the world, though as this "tender, sensuous novel" (The New York Times Book Review) shows, he never lets go of the relationship that shaped him, and every story he's ever told.

"Beautifully translated by Ringwald" (NPR), this is "Philippe Besson's book of a lifetime...an elegiac tale of first, hidden love" (The New Yorker).

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WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

A Frozen Woman charts Ernaux's teenage awakening, and then the parallel progression of her desire to be desirable and her ambition to fulfill herself in her chosen profession - with the inevitable conflict between the two. And then she is thirty years old, a teacher married to an executive, mother of two infant sons. She looks after their nice apartment, raises her children. And yet, like millions of other women, she has felt her enthusiasm and curiosity, her strength and her happiness, slowly ebb under the weight of her daily routine. The very condition that everyone around her seems to consider normal and admirable for a woman is killing her.

While each of Ernaux's books contain an autobiographical element, A Frozen Woman, one of Ernaux's early works, concentrates the spotlight piercingly on Annie herself. Mixing affection, rage and bitterness, A Frozen Woman shows us Ernaux's developing art when she still relied on traditional narrative, before the shortened form emerged that has since become her trademark.

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From the master of French noir and winner of the French Voices Prize, a gripping mystery about the blossoming of poisonous passions set in the brooding landscapes of Gironde, France

When Franck gets out after five years in jail, he expects to find the brother he protected with his silence--instead, waiting for him is his brother Fabien's girlfriend. Jessica takes him to the gloomy country house where she lives with her cantankerous, hard-drinking parents, her eight-year old daughter, Rachel--who doesn't speak, hardly eats, and seems to be carrying a secret much bigger than herself--and a large mastiff dog they all seem to fear.

Time passes, Fabien doesn't return, and Franck is increasingly mystified by Jessica's behavior, seductive at times, hostile at others. Nonetheless, Franck follows her around on her crazy nocturnal rounds until he finds himself with a gun pointed at his head. It's the beginning of a crescendo of retaliation in a gang war in which Franck believes he is participating, only to realize he's merely a sacrificial pawn.

In the scorching heat of the summer, love and violence, sweetness and blood, will result in an unpredictable ending, one that perhaps only the little girl knew from the start. 

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"Peasant civilization possesses as a gift human qualities which philosophical civilizations spend centuries first defining, then desiring, and finally losing." --Jean Giono
A true forebear of magical realism, French author Jean Giono created men and women rooted in the folklore of provincial France. In this beautiful new edition of the original Que Ma Joie Demeure--literally, That My Joy Remain--he tells the tale of a farmer couple in Haute Provence who find that the spark has somehow gone missing from their lives. One day, a stranger arrives who helps them discover how to rekindle their connection. The stranger tells them, "Youth is neither strength, nor a supple body, nor even youth as you conceive of it. Rather, youth is the passion for the impractical, the useless." The couple, with this guidance from the stranger, include friends and neighbors on their journey back to individual and collective happiness. They plant fields of flowers, a meadow of grain just for the birds, and they set their horses free. With a poet's grace and imagination, Giono weaves a grand story of the earth and of passion, of men and women, animals and weather, of the magic we now call the "laws of nature."

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A glamorous prep school girl goes missing after a love affair with a teacher in this "immensely satisfying" thriller from France's #1 bestselling novelist (Harlan Coben).
Twenty-five years ago, on a campus paralyzed by a snowstorm, beautiful 19-year-old Vinca Rockwell ran away with her philosophy teacher after they began a secret affair. For Vinca, "love is everything or nothing."
She is never seen again.
The once inseparable Manon, Thomas and Maxime -- Vinca's best friends -- have not spoken since graduation. Twenty-five years earlier, under terrible circumstances, the three of them committed a murder and buried the body in the gymnasium wall, the same wall that is about to be demolished to make way for an ultramodern new building.
Now, the three friends are about to meet again at their reunion. Will decades of lies unravel to reveal what really happened on that deadly winter night?
Taut, suspenseful, and addictive, The Reunion will grip you until its haunting final page.

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An absorbing bildungsroman that tells the story of three sisters during a decade of radical societal transformation

Three sisters were born into a modest Catholic family in Aix-en-Provence. Sabine, the eldest, dreams of an artist's life in Paris; Hélène, the middle girl, grows up divided between the bourgeois environment of Neuilly-sur-Seine and the simple life led by her parents; Mariette, the youngest, learns the secrets and silences of a dazzling and crazy world. 

In 1970, French society is changing. Women have emancipated themselves whilst men have lost their bearings, and the three sisters, each in their own way, find ways to live a life of their own--a strong life, far from the morality, education, and the religion of their childhood. 

This family chronicle, which takes us from the May 1968 protests to the 1981 elections, is as much a tender and tragic stroll through the 20th century as it is the chronicle of an era, where consciousnesses are awakening to the upheaval of the world, and heralding the chaos to come.

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In shade of a mast bobbing o'er the wave
She waits and waits, a patient slave
The house of stone will be her grave.

Who does what, who catches who?
Who's the cat, who the mouse, who?

It's the middle of a long hot summer on the French Mediterranean shore and the town is teeming with tourists. Sebag and Molino, two tired cops who are being slowly devoured by dull routine and family worries, deal with the day's misdemeanors and petty complaints at the Perpignan police headquarters. But then a young Dutch woman is found murdered on a beach at Argelès, and another one disappears without a trace in the alleys of the city. Is it a serial killer obsessed with Dutch women? Maybe. The media senses fresh meat and moves in for the feeding frenzy.

Out of the blue, Inspector Gilles Sebag finds himself thrust into the middle of a diabolical game. In order to focus on the matter at hand, he will have to put aside his cares, forget his suspicions about his wife's unfaithfulness, ignore his heart murmur, and get over his existential angst. But there is more to the case than anyone suspects.