Dr Tony Shaw

This plaque dedicated to the 'super-human' efforts of Louis-Arsène Bigot (1810–53) bringing the springs of Grainval to Fécamp in...

La fontaine du Précieux-Sang . Legend has it that a little of Christ's blood, concealed in the trunk of a fig tree, fell from the car...

'PAUL DUVAL DIT JEAN LORRAIN 1855 – 1906' Paul Duval was born in Fécamp, where he is buried. He wrote as Jean Lorrai...

I couldn't resist taking a shot of this bookshop I noted in Fécamp, called ' Le Chat Pitre ' ('The Clown Cat'), as it...

Les Jardins d'Étretat, as an attraction, are less than eighteen months old. But their history goes back to 1905, when a local landscape...

Jonathan Franzen is quoted on the front cover of Amity Gaige's Schroder  as calling the main character 'appealing'. Perceptiv...

Didier van Cauwelaert's Vingt ans et des poussières is the Goncourt-winner's first novel, and in a frequently crazy, action-fil...

Jean Echenoz's 14 is a concise title for a concise book. The fourteen relates to the year World War I began, and the devastation of...

Famously, Marie NDiaye wrote her first novel  Quant au riche avenir at the age of sixteen and Jérôme Lindon, founder of the prestigio...

So far Tous mes amis  is Marie NDiaye's only book of short stories and there are five of them, vastly varying in length at times:...

After forty-nine years of Goncourt prizes, Béatrix Beck became only the second woman (after Elsa Triolet in 1944) to be awarded it in 195...

There's a French expression ' marcher à  côté de ses pompes ' that could be translated as 'being in another world', ...

Une ambition dans le désert  is a gem from Albert Cossery, and I can only describe it as an anarchist rant thinly hidden within a kind ...

René Benjamin's Gaspard was the first World War I novel and won the Prix Goncourt in 1915. Other books about the war that followed a...

The title Truismes has a double meaning: on the one hand truisms, on the other, er, 'sowisms', or what comes from female pigs....

This book I remember buying for a few cents at The Strand bookstore in New York some years ago, before I developed my acute allergy to bo...

This is an almost unbelievable story, although true. Christopher Smart, aged twenty, decided one day in 1986 to live in the woods in the...

No work by Bernard-Marie Koltès is a comfortable read. Here we have a sixty-three page play, or short 'story' (a questionable t...

Another vintage gem from Jocelyne François, found in one of my favourite Paris bookshops for all of one euro. The back cover says  Joue-n...

This is really the story of two lives in one person: first Joan Adeney Easdale, who was a promising poet in her youth; and the second So...

Tahar Djaout (1954–93) died at the age of thirty-nine, one of the first victims of Algeria's 'Decade of Terrorism'. Les Cher...

Although the place is unnamed, Bernard-Marie Koltès bases the setting and the architecture on a large disused shed (destroyed in the ea...

Une vie de boy  (1956) by  Ferdinand Oyono (1929–2010) is the first part of a trilogy (also including Le Vieux Nègre et la médaille  (195...

Wow. Although Bascoulard: dessinateur virtuose, clochard magnifique, femme inventée  (2014) has (by a very long shot) to be the most inte...

Today, any mention of François-Marie Banier is perhaps inevitably greeted with a smile or a laugh, in remembrance of his recent antics in...