Paris (France) (AFP) – What will be the star books at the end of the year? A month after the release of the novels for the literary season, a new burst of works by recognized authors arrives in bookstores, including Patrick Modiano, Adèle Yon, Christine Angot, Giuliano da Empoli and Marc Lévy.
Published on: 09/30/2026 - 11:02
His admirers will not be surprised: “The Elephant” (Gallimard), the new novel by Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano, 81, is very “Modianesque” in both content and form. Its narrator, a solitary Parisian, tries to investigate the lives of his neighbors whom he observes through binoculars at night. Which awakens uncertain memories buried deep in his memory.
In “Investigation into the double ghost” (Editions du sous-sol), the young 32-year-old author and researcher Adèle Yon extends her reflection begun with “My real name is Elisabeth”, an unexpected literary success of 2025, by “surveying the porous border between subjective writing and scientific approach”.
More than 800 pages for a busy life: in “Provisional Memories”, Bernard-Henri Lévy, 77, recounts his meetings with Golda Meir, Aragon, Mitterrand or Albert Cohen, and his struggles, from Kurdistan to Sarajevo. This book is the first published by Olivier Nora's new publishing house after his dismissal from Grasset in the spring.
Four years after "The Mage of the Kremlin", Giuliano Da Empoli returns to fiction with "The Founder" (Gallimard), a merciless story about the excesses of a sprawling technological surveillance company and its all-powerful leader, a character loosely inspired by Peter Thiel, the libertarian boss of the American group Palantir.
The author of "Incest", the punchy story which shook up literature in 1999, publishes a short story, "I change my name" (Flammarion), in which she explains why she abandons her father's name to prefer that of Schwartz, that of her mother.
With nostalgia and humor, Jean-Paul Dubois recounts in “Chacun” (L'Olivier) the dismay of Paul, a fifty-year-old living in the memory of his wife who died two years ago. How can we “stand up until the end?”, asks the disenchanted hero of the 2019 Goncourt Prize novel.
Saint-Malo novelist Agnès Martin-Lugand, whose first 12 books have sold more than five million copies worldwide, explores in “Return to Folegandros” (Michel Lafon) the bonds and wounds of a family reunited on a Greek island.
Marc Lévy returns with the two volumes of "Escapes" (Robert Laffont), the story of twins - an Interpol investigator and a scientist on the east coast of the United States - separated by existence but whose destinies intersect against a backdrop of human trafficking in Asia.
In "Tokyorama" (Albin Michel), Jean-Christophe Grangé plunges into the underbelly of Tokyo, presented as a capital of vice, in the footsteps of a French private detective investigating the death of a boss in a hostess bar.
The Toulouse doctor novelist Baptiste Beaulieu, who enjoyed success with "Where the tears go when they dry", recounts in "The Man Who Chooses Gentleness" (L'Iconoclaste) the life of a doctor who joins a support group of caregivers when he doubts the meaning of his profession after the birth of his child.
The author of the “Ants” trilogy, Bernard Werber, mixes fiction, science and reflections in “At the edge of the world” (Albin Michel), which looks at the phenomenon of “flatists”, these defenders of the theory according to which the Earth is flat and not round.
© 2026 AFP
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