Dr Tony Shaw

This fascinating little-known novel by the little-known Albert t'Serstevens has a sixty-six page Afterword by the also little-known (but...

I know I have a thing about title translations (OK, translation in general) but 'Gangster Boss' is surely one of the most stupid. Wh...

Yes, that's a thousand billion dollars, a huge sum of money today and obviously considerably much more huge in 1982. But that's the ...

Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé is a celebration of a kind of non-intellectual anarchism: it (exaggeratedly) delights in the simple pleasu...

The best general description of this wonderful book is on the back page of the Folio edition, which manages to include virtually all the ele...

  I was fortunate enough to buy this almost unread  and signed copy of Violaine Bérot's Pas moins que lui , the dedication of which read...

This is a 526-page book concerning a multiple murder ten years ago, and which still has France in thrall largely due to various 'sightin...

  The writer Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam writes her romans noirs , of which this is an example, under the pseudonym Rebecca Lighieri.  Les  Garç...

L'Œuvre posthume de Thomas Pilaster is Éric Chevillard's ninth novel and was perhaps in part inspired by Vladimir Nabokov's Pal...

  So, a book titled The Death of Camus  (originally  Camus deve morire  ('Camus Must Die')) with a Foreword by Paul Auster. Inviting...

Claire de Duras (1777-1828) is an almost forgotten name in French literature, and yet the few novels she wrote, being concerned with differe...

Take two people like Jean Cosmo and Paula Wilmann – meeting quite by chance at a wedding reception – although Jean doesn't really know t...

And so we see the back of the hirsute Léo Ferré (at the PSU celebration on 30 May 1973). Many books have been written about Ferré, and this ...

Imagine Blake, or whatever his name is at a particular time, or rather whatever his many names are, who is a hired killer, or rather he owns...

Michel Déon's Un taxi mauve  is a strange, and strangely haunting, novel. Set in his beloved Ireland, where Déon died, we have a motley ...

Laurent Mauvignier's Histoires de la nuit  was published earlier this month and isn't among the fifteen novels long-listed for the P...

Dans la diagonale  is written by the writer of the novel  Entre les murs  ( The Class) , which was published the year after this novel (2006...

In Lac  (1999) Jean Echenoz wrote a kind of parody of the espionage novel, and after some time dabbling with biographical novels returned...

Éric Chevillard's Sans l'orang-outan has been said to be his most political novel, and that is perfectly understandable: it depic...

Choir , literally meaning 'Falling' (possibly in a (mock-)religious sense), is almost undoubtedly one of Éric Chevillard's bl...