This book often makes readers have mixed feelings. On the one hand we see the life of a typical bourgeois family of the last century, described very realistic, the eyes men for the wedding, life together, the arrival of children, etc. 

Such a view in the literature is not typical because usually the relations between the sexes – the sphere of the possession of the writers. This interest in the book.

On the other hand, Hervé Bazin describes everything is so realistic that at times it becomes uncomfortable. In this case, I note, I read all kinds of books, say, Henry Miller, who did not skimp on realism in the description of relations and the description of sexual life. But I have never experienced. 

When reading Bazin, there is an uneasy feeling, the same one as written Strugatsky, which makes Prim toes. Feel like spying on people through the glass, and they do not know

Rene bazin is already known to the English public as a writer of exquisite charm and wonderful sensibility. The Nun, Redemption, and This My Son have revealed his powers to appreciative readers. Bazin is not only an original writer, a charming story-teller, but also a deep thinker, a clear delineator of human character and life, a, wonderful landscape-painter, and a bold realist. For it is real life, humble, poignant, palpitating, which we meet in his stories. Life, full of misery and suffering, but also of pity and charity, of self-sacrifice and heroic traits. Bazin is a passionate admirer of Nature, and this admiration and love manifest themselves in his preference for pastoral and rural scenes, and his description of nature and peasant life

Marc Marronier comes of age whilst exploring his professed belief that 'love lasts only three years'. Despite the wit – the author’s trademark is wrong-footing humour - this is not an easy read. But make up your mind to enjoy the constant changes in style (including the two pages without full stops, let alone paragraphs) and just go with the flow. I guarantee you'll find Marc's surprising metamorphosis well worth any effort.

The protagonist / narrator Ben Abdallah, who prefers to be called Béni, is an overweight adolescent who, though he is doing well at school, is engaged in a daily struggle to find his place in French society

Young Moroccans gather regularly in a seafront cafe to gaze at the lights on the Spanish coast glimmering in the distance. A young man called Azel is intent upon leaving one way or another. At the brink of despair he meets Miguel, a wealthy Spanish gallery-owner, who promises to take him to Barcelona if Azel will become his lover.

imone de Beauvoir's first-person account of the last ten years of Sartre's life, and it is heartbreaking to read in several places.... The prose is characteristic of de Beauvoir: deeply and intimately detailed, meticulous, and dense in some places.... it gives the reader an even more thorough understanding of the devoted side of de Beauvoir--and the very human and mortal side of the great philosopher Sartre. 

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s.

She vividly evokes her friendships, love interests, mentors, and the early days of the most important relationship of her life, with fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre, against the backdrop of a turbulent time politically

In this lyrical, hallucinatory novel set in Morocco, Tahar Ben Jelloun offers an imaginative and radical critique of contemporary Arab social customs and Islamic law. The Sand Child tells the story of a Moroccan father's effort to thwart the consequences of Islam's inheritance laws regarding female offspring. Already the father of seven daughters, Hajji Ahmed determines that his eighth child will be a male. Accordingly, the infant, a girl, is named Mohammed Ahmed and raised as a young man with all the privileges granted exclusively to men in traditional Arab-Islamic societies. As she matures, however, Ahmed's desire to have children marks the beginning of her sexual evolution, and as a woman named Zahra, Ahmed begins to explore her true sexual identity. Drawing on the rich Arabic oral tradition, Ben Jelloun relates the extraordinary events of Ahmed's life through a professional storyteller and the listeners who have gathered in a Marrakesh market square in the 1950s to hear his tale. A poetic vision of power, colonialism, and gender in North Africa, The Sand Child has been justifiably celebrated around the world as a daring and significant work of international fiction

Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt's sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction. Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case.

September 29th 1938. The day the fate of Czechoslovakia was sealed by the Munich Agreement. Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain & - the phantom of Munich, Edouard Daladier, president of the French Council were all present. This novel tells the story behind one of the 20th century's most decisive moments.

The story in "Joy" follows a young girl with a saint-like purity and simplicity who lives with her neurotic father, her demented yet shrewd grandmother, and a host of weird servants including a vaguely criminal Russia chauffeur. The already confused atmosphere of the house is thrown into further turmoil with a looming marriage and visits from a cynical psychologist and a priest with a secret he fears was betrayed. 

In a small village in northern France, Monsieur Ouine, a retired professor, is taken in by the dull local squire, Anthelme de Néréis, and soon rules the life of both Anthelme and his wife, Ginette. A fourteen-year-old fatherless boy, Philippe Dorval, flees home and, on impulse, follows Madame de Néréis to her château. There the squire, who is dying, tells the boy that his father is actually alive and well—that despite what Philippe’s mother had told him, his father had not died in World War I. The forsaken boy finds himself on that fatal evening succumbing to Monsieur Ouine’s embrace after falling into a drunken sleep in the old professor’s bed. The events of the tempestuous night lead to upheaval in the village the next morning, when, at dawn, a boy’s body is found afloat in a stream near the château. 

HHhH: “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich”, or “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”. The most dangerous man in Hitler’s cabinet, Reinhard Heydrich was known as the “Butcher of Prague.” He was feared by all and loathed by most. With his cold Aryan features and implacable cruelty, Heydrich seemed indestructible—until two men, a Slovak and a Czech recruited by the British secret service, killed him in broad daylight on a bustling street in Prague, and thus changed the course of History. Who were these men, arguably two of the most discreet heroes of the twentieth century? In Laurent Binet’s captivating debut novel, we follow Jozef Gab?ik and Jan Kubiš from their dramatic escape of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to England; from their recruitment to their harrowing parachute drop into a war zone, from their stealth attack on Heydrich’s car to their own brutal death in the basement of a Prague church. A seemingly effortlessly blend of historical truth, personal memory, and Laurent Binet’s remarkable imagination, HHhH—an international bestseller and winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman—is a work at once thrilling and intellectually engrossing, a fast-paced novel of the Second World War that is also a profound meditation on the nature of writing and the debt we owe to history.

Ordered to hold an abandoned army post, John Dunbar found himself alone, beyond the edge of civilization. Thievery and survival soon forced him into the Indian camp, where he began a dangerous adventure that changed his life forever. 

French monthly magazine and publisher for children. Created in parallel to J'aime Lire, but for younger readers aged 6-7 years old.

Sébastien and Sophie live rent-free in a lavish apartment in the seventh arrondissement owned by Sophie's wealthy parents. Sébastien's modest salary as a history teacher barely suffices to entertain their numerous Bohemian friends, but they coast along until Sophie's father, Sasha de Novilis, asks the young couple to entertain his friend the Prince von Arunberg-Buzbach. As it happens, during the war Sébastien spent a few months on the Prince's estate, tending to the horses, and had a romance with the Prince's niece Albertina. The Prince, who has fallen on hard times and has come to Paris to negotiate the sale of family jewels, shamelessly "borrows" money off Sébastien. But the crux of the matter is that when Albertina, who believed Sébastien dead, joins her uncle, the affair is resumed. Bored to death with his dull school teacher's life, Sébastien is unable to resist the temptation of reliving the intense emotions he felt as man on the run during the war. This second affair with the same woman will peter out, leaving Sébastien half-relieved and half-depressed to have to resume his dull but not unpleasant routine.

A touching story as a song that oscillates between the intimate and the universal.
It is a long poem, where the ink draws the hollows and the silences, sketches the voids, where the past "hugs the others, those whose story spreads to Nina Bouraoui". It is an assemblage of texts, more exactly moods, pauses and sighs that fit into a story, which always returns to the sea.

1942: Boldly advancing through Asia, the Japanese need a train route from Burma going north. In a prison camp, British POWs are forced into labor. The bridge they build will become a symbol of service and survival to one prisoner, Colonel Nicholson, a proud perfectionist. Pitted against the warden, Colonel Saito, Nicholson will nevertheless, out of a distorted sense of duty, aid his enemy. While on the outside, as the Allies race to destroy the bridge, Nicholson must decide which will be the first casualty: his patriotism or his pride