Sacré bleu!

France is mired in a losing war against England. Its people are starving. Its king is in hiding. And out of the chaos, an unlikely heroine is emerging. Reckless, steel-willed and brilliant, Joan has survived a childhood steeped in both joy and violence to claim an extraordinary - and fragile - po...

January 2003. The Berest family receive a mysterious, unsigned postcard. On one side was an image of the Opéra Garnier; on the other, the names of their relatives who were killed in Auschwitz: Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, and Jacques. Years later, Anne sought to find the truth behind this postcard. ...

This is a book about yoga. Or at least, it was. January 2015. High on literary success and familial bliss, Emmanuel Carrère embarks on a rigorous ten-day meditative retreat in rural France in search of clarity and material for his next book, which he thinks will be a subtle, upbeat introduction ...

When flight Air France 006 enters a terrifying storm, the plane - inexplicably - duplicates. For every passenger on board that day, there are now two - a double with the same mind, body and memories. Just one thing sets them apart. One plane leaves the storm in March. The other doesn't land until...

The Salpetriere asylum, Paris, 1885. Dr Charcot holds all of Paris in thrall with his displays of hypnotism on women who have been deemed mad, hysterics, and been cast out from society. But the truth is much more complicated - these women are often simply inconvenient, unwanted wives, those who h...

Sex, and death. All of Marguerite Duras's writings are suffused with the certitude that absolute love is both necessary (sex) and impossible to achieve (death). But no book of hers embodies this idea so powerfully, so excessively, as 'No More', the book she composed during the last year of her li...

1986: Adrien, Etienne and Nina are 10 years old when they meet at school and become inseparable. They promise each other they will one day leave their provincial backwater, move to Paris, and never part. 2017: A car is pulled up from the bottom of the lake, a body inside. Virginie, a local journa...

Alfa and Mademba are two of the many Senegalese soldiers fighting in the Great War. Together they climb dutifully out of their trenches to attack France's German enemies whenever the whistle blows, until Mademba is mortally wounded, and dies in a shell hole with his belly torn open. Without his m...

Richard Lionheart tells the story of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. In 1173, she and three of her sons instigate a rebellion to overthrow the English king, her husband Henry Plantagenet. What prompts this revolt? How does a great queen persuade her children to rise up against their father? And...

Obsessed by her encounters with the mysterious green women, and haunted by the Garonne River, a nameless narrator seeks them out in La Roele, Paris, Marseille, and Ouagadougou. Each encounter reveals different aspects of the women; real or imagined, dead or alive, seductive or suicidal, driving t...