Dr Tony Shaw

What to do on a wet day in France? Read a book found in a boîte à lire is one possibility, and I've been meaning to read Adeline Dieudo...

André Baillon's Histoire d'une Marie  is a largely autobiographical novel in that the main character is Marie Guillot (changing t...

The life of André Baillon (1875-1932) was cut short by his fifth (and obviously successful) suicide attempt. An orphan at the age of six ...

In Pierre Lepape's review of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's novel L'Appareil Photo (translated into English as Camera ) on 9 Jan...

That is, not 'bathroom' in the American sense. La Salle de bain was Jean-Philippe's first novel, which seems to be about a ...

I haven't of course read this series in order, which doesn't really matter as the books can be read in any sequence: they are se...

This novel is the final part of what critics have called ' Le Cycle de Marie ', or what the publisher Minuit seems to prefer to ...

Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Faire l'amour | Making Love (2002) is the first of a tetralogy known as Le Cycle de Marie (or the full...

This edition of Caroline Lamarche's second book, Le Jour du chien , is published by the Belgian company Espace Nord, and comes with t...

From 1947 to 1951 Henry Bauchau (1913–2012) underwent psychoanalysis with Blanche Reverchon, the wife of the poet Pierre Jean Jouve, and ...

'1875 – 1932   AU ROMANCIER ANDRÉ BAILLON SES AMIS.'     An impressive tribute to the brilliant Belgian-bor...

Eugène Savitzkaya is a Belgian writer who has written many poetry books and novels. Exquise Louise is classed as one of Savitz kaya'...

André Baillon's troubled life began in Belgium in 1875, his father dying exactly a year after his birth. His mother died when he was ...

Eric-Emmanuel wrote Milarepa for Bruno Abraham-Kremer, who later directed it as a play. Milarepa (1040–1123) was a Tibetan Buddhist, a...

    The tomb of the Belgian symbolist poet and novelist Georges Rodenbach (1855–98), one of the most striking in Père-Lachaise. ...

I was reminded of movie director Alan J. Pakula's films when reading Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Fuir (2005), or Running Away , bu...

Tuer le père (literally 'Killing the Father') is Amélie Nothomb's latest work, although Barbe-Bleue ('Bluebeard' as...

In English this is  The Book of Proper Names , but much is missed in the translation of this title. At the age of nineteen Lucette...

Perhaps only four or five of Amélie Nothomb's novels can be classed as what the French term ' autofiction ', but all of them...

Acide sulfurique is probably the strongest social criticism Amélie Nothomb has so far made, and it is significant - bearing in mind tha...