Ortog

“These two classic French fantasy novels, written in 1960 and 1969, star Knight-Navigator Dal Ortog of Galankar who lives on a 50th century Earth where space travel cohexists with a medieval society.

First, Ortog is sent by Sopharch Karella to the far reaches of space to find a cure for the slow death that is killing humanity after a devastating interplanetary war. Ortog returns with a cure, but too late to save his love, Karella's daughter, Kalla.

In the sequel, Ortog and his friend, Zoltan Charles Henderson de Nancy, embark on a quest through the dimensions of Death to find Kalla's soul and bring her back to Earth.

’Kurt Steiner’ is the pseudonym of André Ruellan, one of France's best-known science fiction and horror writers, as well as one of its most distinguished film writers. Brian M. Stableford has been a professional writer since 1965. He has published more than 60 science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as several authoritative non-fiction books.”

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Hunting and Gathering

“Prize-winning author Anna Gavalda has galvanized the literary world with an exquisite genius for storytelling.

Here, in her epic new novel of intimate lives-and filled with the ‘humanity and wit’ (Marie Claire) that has made it a bestselling sensation in France.

Gavalda explores the twists of fate that connect four people in Paris.

Comprised of a starving artist, her shy, aristocratic neighbor, his obnoxious but talented roommate, and a neglected grandmother, this curious, damaged quartet may be hopeless apart, but together, they may just be able to face the world.”

“Gavalda's comically implausible and comfortably predictable novel of misfits is a Gallic charmer anchored by breezy and poignant storytelling.” —Publishers Weekly

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The Flowers of Evil

“Les Flers du Mal, translated as The Flowers of Evil (first published in 1857), originally condemned as obscene, is recognized as a masterpiece, especially remarkable for the brilliant phrasing, rhythm, and expressiveness of its lyrics. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was one of the greatest French poets of the 19th century. His work has been a major influence on Western poetry and modern poetry in general as, thematically, he was one of the first poets whose subject was often urban life and its dark side, with all of its evils and the degradation of its temptations.

His poems, classical in form, introduced Symbolism, he is also known as a writer of the Decadent group. Baudelaire was moody and rebellious, imbued with an intense religious mysticism, and his work reflects an unremitting inner despair. His main theme is the inseparable nature of beauty and corruption.

The Flowers of Evil is a volume of French poetry that was important in the symbolist and modernist movements. The subject matter of these poems deals with themes relating to decadence and eroticism. The author and the publisher were prosecuted under the regime of the Second Empire as an an insult to public decency. As a consequence of this prosecution, Baudelaire was fined 300 francs.

Six poems from the work were suppressed and the ban on their publication was not lifted in France until 1949. Upon reading The Swan, Victor Hugo announced that Baudelaire had created a new shudder, a new thrill in literature.”

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The Red Notebook

“Bookseller Laurent Letellier comes across an abandoned handbag on a Parisian street, and feels impelled to return it to its owner. The bag contains no money, phone or contact information.

But a small red notebook with handwritten thoughts and jottings reveals a person that Laurent would very much like to meet.

Without even a name to go on, and only a few of her possessions to help him, how is he to find one woman in a city of millions?”

”An endearing love story written in beautifully poetic prose. It is an enthralling mystery about chasing the unknown, the nostalgia for what could have been, and most importantly, the persistence of curiosity”— San Francisco Book Review

“The very quintessence of French romance. “ —The Times

(A special thank you to book club member, Christine Jensen for the suggestion.)

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Irène

“For Commandant Camille Verhoeven life is beautiful. He is happily married and soon to become a father.

But his blissful existence is punctured by a murder of unprecedented savagery. When his team discovers that the killer has form—and each murder is a homage to a classic crime novel—the Parisian press are quick to coin a nickname . . . The Novelist.

With the public eye fixed on both hunter and hunted, the case develops into a personal duel, each hell bent on outsmarting the other. There can only be one winner. The one who has the least to lose.”

"Irène is compulsive reading . . . The narrative is fast-paced and the suspense unbearably taut.” —The Sydney Morning Herald

”Pierre Lemaitre's Alex earned rave reviews last year, not least for the way Lemaitre reworked the tropes of the conventional serial-killer novel to create a clever police procedural that worked as a superb thriller even as it confounded readers' expectations of the genre. The follow-up, Irène, is equally clever, as the diminutive Parisian detective Camille Verhoeven is initially confronted with a murder scene so horrific that it puts him in mind of Goya's Saturn Devouring his Son.” ―Irish Times

(A special thank you to book club member, Penny Stephens for the suggestion.)

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The Chalk Circle Man

“Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg is not like other policemen. His methods appear unorthodox in the extreme: he doesn't search for clues; he ignores obvious suspects and arrests people with cast-iron alibis; he appears permanently distracted. In spite of all this his colleagues are forced to admit that he is a born cop.

When strange blue chalk circles start appearing overnight on the pavements of Paris, only Adamsberg takes them and the increasingly bizarre objects found within them —seriously. And when the body of a woman with her throat savagely cut is found in one, only Adamsberg realises that other murders will soon follow…”

“Rich and witty.“ —Independent

“The hottest property in contemporary crime fiction.” —Guardian

“Rich and witty.“ —Independent

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The Mote in Time's Eye

“20,000 years from now, a space ship from the human colonies of the Lesser Magellanic Clouds accidentally falls into a time trap set up by two unimaginably powerful rival empires from millions of years in the future. The ship is thrown back 200 million years into the past. Will its Captain, the heroic Varun Shangrin, succeed in returning to their own time? And how did the accident affect the time war between the two shadowy cosmic combatants?

Gérard Klein is a distinguished economist and one of France's best known science fiction writers. He also edited the prestigious science fiction imprint Ailleurs et Demain for 40 years. This new edition of this classic SF novel from 1965 also includes four short stories translated by SF Grand Master Damon Knight, and an introduction and bibliography by Jean-Marc Lofficier.”

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Submission

“It’s 2022. François is bored. He’s a middle-aged lecturer at the New Sorbonne University and an expert on J. K. Huysmans, the famed nineteenth-century novelist associated with the Decadent movement.

But François’s own decadence is of considerably smaller scale. He sleeps with his students, eats microwave dinners, and watches YouPorn.

Meanwhile, it’s election season, and in an alliance with the Socialists, France’s new Islamic party sweeps to power―and Islamic law is instituted. Women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged, and François is offered an irresistible academic advancement―on the condition that he converts to Islam.

A darkly comic masterpiece from one of France’s great writers, Submission by Michel Houellebecq has become an international sensation and one of the most discussed novels of our time.”

“Extraordinary . . . if there is anyone in literature today, not just in French but worldwide, who is thinking about the sort of enormous shifts we all feel are happening, it’s Houellebecq.” ―Le Monde

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The Awkward Squad

“Suspended from her job as a promising police officer for firing ‘one bullet too many’, Anne Capestan is expecting the worst when she is summoned to H.Q. to learn her fate. Instead, she is surprised to be told that she is to head up a new police squad, working on solving old cold cases.

Though relieved to still have a job, Capestan is not overjoyed by the prospect of her new role. Even less so when she meets her new team: a crowd of misfits, troublemakers and problem cases, none of whom are fit for purpose and yet none of whom can be fired.

But from this inauspicious start, investigating the cold cases throws up a number a number of strange mysteries for Capestan and her team: was the old lady murdered seven years ago really just the victim of a botched robbery? Who was behind the dead sailor discovered in the Seine with three gunshot wounds? And why does there seem to be a curious link with a ferry that was shipwrecked off the Florida coast many years previously?”

“Both amusing and interesting to watch this awkward squad gradually acquiring an esprit de corps . . . This very enjoyable tale has deservingly won several French literary prizes.” —Literary Review

”Misfit Paris cops bring an entertaining collection of idiosyncrasies to the newly formed cold-case team headed by impetuous detective Anne Capestan—though the fun has to stop as they start to piece together evidence of serious corruption in high places.” —Crime Club

(A special thank you to book club member, Penny Stephens for the suggestion.)

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The Dark Angel

“On the one hand, there's Lola. A grumpy retired policewoman who cannot get by without her two best friends: red wine and jigsaw puzzles. On the other, there's Ingrid, an American in love with Paris. By day she gives the best massages in the city, and her long nights are wilder still...

Their paths might not have crossed were it not for the murder of a young neighbour. Vanessa Ringer's body is found in the flat she shared with two schoolfriends, mutilated in the most cruel and unusual manner.

Suspicion falls on Maxime Duchamp, a charming restaurateur whose suave exterior hides a tragic past. Convinced of his innocence, Lola and Ingrid hit the streets to unmask the real killer.

Meanwhile, lying low, the victim's spurned lover, a high-stakes thief with one last heist to go, is plotting his revenge. His inner demon, the Dark Angel, has foreshadowed all...”

“An echo of Chandler's gallant, world-weary Philip Marlowe ... Sylvain successfully weaves a spider's web of unexplained events, suspicions and compelling motivations.” — Glasgow Herald

“Dominique Sylvain's thriller has the usual twists and turns and the obligatory dead body as expected of a crime novel. But what sets this typical piece apart from the others is the sleuths out to unmask the killer ... The writing is superb.“ —The Irish Examiner

(A special thank you to book club member, Yurena Bookish for the suggestion.)

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Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Qu'ran

“Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt is one of the most performed French-language authors in the world.

Paris in the 1960s. Thirteen-year-old Moses lives in the shadow of his less-than loving father. When he's caught stealing from wise old shopkeeper Monsieur Ibrahim, he discovers an unlikely friend and a whole new world. Together they embark on a journey that takes them from the streets of Paris to the whirling dervishes of the Golden Crescent.

This delightful, moving play has already been a huge hit in Paris and New York. Performed in thirteen countries and published in twelve languages, it is also an award-winning film starring Omar Sharif.”

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Au Bonheur des Dames (aka The Ladies Delight)

“Through charm, drive, and diligent effort Octave Mouret has become the director of one of the finest new department stores in Paris, Au Bonheur des Dames.

Supremely aware of the power of his position, Mouret seeks to exploit the desire that his luxuriantly displayed merchandise arouses in the ladies who shop, and the aspirations of the young female assistants he employs.

Charting the beginnings of the capitalist economy and bourgeois society, Zola captures in lavish detail the greedy customers and gossiping staff, and the obsession with image, fashion, and gratification that was a phenomenon of nineteenth-century French consumer society. Of all Zola's novels, this may be the one with the most relevance for our own time.

Now the basis for the major BBC tv adaptation The Paradise, this is a lavish drama and a timeless commentary on consumerism. The Penguin Classics edition of Émile Zola's The Ladies' Delight is based on an acclaimed, vivid and modern translation by Robin Buss, who has also introduced the novel.”

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Notes of a Crocodile

“Winner of the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize

Longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize

A New York Times Editors' Choice

The English-language premiere of Qiu Miaojin's coming-of-age novel about queer teenagers in Taiwan, a cult classic in China and winner of the 1995 China Times Literature Award.

An NYRB Classics Original

Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan's most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure.

Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend.

Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.”

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Not One Day

One of Flavorwire’s “22 Essential Women Writers to Read in Translation”

Winner of the 2018 Albertine Prize

Finalist for the 2018 Lamba Literary Awards

Finalist for the 2018 French American Foundation Translation Prize

Not One Day won the Prix Médicis in 2002, recognizing Garréta as an author “whose fame does not yet match their talent.”

“Not One Day begins with a maxim: ‘Not one day without a woman.’ What follows is an intimate, erotic, and sometimes bitter recounting of loves and lovers past, breathtakingly written, exploring the interplay between memory, fantasy, and desire.

‘For life is too short to submit to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women one does not love.’”

“Although the book swerves briefly into the erotic, the majority of the text is a heady meditation. Where we expect to find a confession of the body, we are in fact met with a confession of the mind, as Garréta laments the imposition of hetero normative gender roles upon queer desire. This leaves the reader with another question: how can we invent alternate ways to express desire outside of hetero dichotomy?” —Lambda Literary

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Infidels

Written by an author often cited as the “first openly gay novelist from Morocco,” where same-sex sexual activity has been illegal since 1962. Infidels tells the story of a ten-year-old boy, the son of a prostitute, who grows up to become a young gay Muslim, and then a jihadi (i.e., an Islamic militant). 

Set in Salé, Morocco—the hometown Abdellah Taïa fled but to which he returns again and again in his acclaimed fiction and films—Infidels follows the life of Jallal, the son of a prostitute witch doctor—”a woman who knew men, humanity, better than anyone. In sex. Beyond sex.” As a ten-year-old sidekick to his mother, Jallal spits in the face of her enemies both real and imagined.

The cast of characters that rush into their lives are unforgettable for their dreams of love and belonging that unravel in turn. Built as a series of monologues that are emotionally relentless—a mix of confession, heart's murmuring, and shouting match—the book follows Jallal out of boyhood on the path to Jihad. It's a path that surprises even him.

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Friend

“Paek Nam-nyong’s Friend is a tale of marital intrigue, abuse, and divorce in North Korea. A woman in her thirties comes to a courthouse petitioning for a divorce. As the judge who hears her statement begins to investigate the case, the story unfolds into a broader consideration of love and marriage. The novel delves into its protagonists’ past, describing how the couple first fell in love and then how their marriage deteriorated over the years. It chronicles the toll their acrimony takes on their son and their careers alongside the story of the judge’s own marital troubles.

A best-seller in North Korea, where Paek continues to live and write, Friend illuminates a side of life in the DPRK that Western readers have never before encountered. Far from being a propagandistic screed in praise of the Great Leader, Friend describes the lives of people who struggle with everyday problems such as marital woes and workplace conflicts. Instead of socialist-realist stock figures, Paek depicts complex characters who wrestle with universal questions of individual identity, the split between public and private selves, the unpredictability of existence, and the never-ending labor of maintaining a relationship. This groundbreaking translation of one of North Korea’s most popular writers offers English-language readers a page-turner full of psychological tension as well as a revealing portrait of a society that is typically seen as closed to the outside world.”

(A special thank you to book club member, Christine Jensen for the suggestion.)

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Flowers of Mold

“If you're looking for a book that will make you gasp out loud, you’ve found it.” —Kirkus Reviews

“This impressive collection reveals Ha’s close attention to the eccentricities of life, and is sure to earn her a legion of new admirers.” —Publishers Weekly

“Joining a growing cohort of notable Korean imports, Ha’s dazzling, vaguely intertwined collection of 10 stories is poised for Western acclaim.” —Booklist

On the surface, Ha Seong-nan’s stories seem pleasant enough, yet there’s something disturbing just below the surface, ready to permanently disrupt the characters’ lives.

A woman meets her next-door neighbor and loans her a spatula, then starts suffering horrific gaps in her memory. A man, feeling jilted by an unrequited love, becomes obsessed with sorting through his neighbors’ garbage in the belief that it will teach him how to better relate to people. A landlord decides to raise the rent, and his tenants hatch a plan to kill him at a team-building retreat.

In ten captivating, unnerving stories, Flowers of Mold presents a range of ordinary individuals—male and female, young and old—who have found themselves left behind by an increasingly urbanized and fragmented world.

The latest in the trend of brilliant female Korean authors to appear in English, Ha cuts like a surgeon, and even the most mundane objects become menacing and unfamiliar under her scalpel.

(Group read suggestion from Ivor Watkins, book club moderator.)

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The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly

The Korean Charlotte's Web

“It has the plain language of a folktale but also its power of dark suggestion.” —NPR

“Bewitching . . . a bestseller told from the point of view of a homeless hen, which will make grown men and women cry.” —The Independent
 
This is the story of a hen named Sprout. No longer content to lay eggs on command, only to have them carted off to the market, she glimpses her future every morning through the barn doors, where the other animals roam free, and comes up with a plan to escape into the wild—and to hatch an egg of her own.

An anthem for freedom, individuality and motherhood featuring a plucky, spirited heroine who rebels against the tradition-bound world of the barnyard, The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly is a novel of universal resonance that also opens a window on Korea, where it has captivated millions of readers. And with its array of animal characters—the hen, the duck, the rooster, the dog, the weasel—it calls to mind such classics in English as Animal Farm and Charlotte’s Web.

Featuring specially-commissioned illustrations, this first English-language edition of Sun-mi Hwang’s fable for our times beautifully captures the journey of an unforgettable character in world literature.

(A special thank you to book club member, Christine Jensen for the group read suggestion.)

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I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

“A mesmerizing novel of a love triangle and a mysterious disappearance in South Korea.” —Booklist

In the fast-paced, high-urban landscape of Seoul, C and K are brothers who have fallen in love with the same woman—Se-yeon—who tears at both of them as they all try desperately to find real connection in an atomized world. A spectral, nameless narrator haunts the edges of their lives as he tells of his work helping the lost and hurting find escape through suicide.

Dreamlike and beautiful, the South Korea brought forth in this novel is cinematic in its urgency and its reflection of contemporary life everywhere—far beyond the boundaries of the Korean peninsula. Recalling the emotional tension of Milan Kundera and the existential anguish of Bret Easton Ellis, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself achieves its author’s greatest wish—to show Korean literature as part of an international tradition. Young-ha Kim is a young master, the leading literary voice of his generation.

(A special thank you to book club member, Nicole Viola Hinz-Schouwstra for the group read suggestion.)

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The Impossible Fairy Tale

“This transfixing experimental novel questions where sleep ends and books begin, a concept borrowed from Maurice Blanchot while the atmosphere of nightmarish dread and penetrating weirdness recalls a David Lynch film.” —Publishers Weekly

One of World Literature Today's 75 Notable Translations of 2017

The Impossible Fairy Tale is the story of two unexceptional grade-school girls. Mia is “lucky”—she is spoiled by her mother and, as she explains, her two fathers. She gloats over her exotic imported colored pencils and won’t be denied a coveted sweater. Then there is the Child who, by contrast, is neither lucky nor unlucky. She makes so little impression that she seems not even to merit a name.

At school, their fellow students, whether lucky or luckless or unlucky, seem consumed by an almost murderous rage. Adults are nearly invisible, and the society the children create on their own is marked by cruelty and soul-crushing hierarchies. Then, one day, the Child sneaks into the classroom after hours and adds ominous sentences to her classmates’ notebooks. This sinister but initially inconsequential act unlocks a series of events that end in horrible violence.

But that is not the end of this eerie, unpredictable novel. A teacher, who is also this book’s author, wakes from an intense dream. When she arrives at her next class, she recognizes a student: the Child, who knows about the events of the novel’s first half, which took place years before. The Impossible Fairy Tale is a fresh and terrifying exploration of the ethics of art making and of the stinging consequences of neglect.

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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