Dr Tony Shaw

Although much shorter than Duclos and Martin's biography, which I could in no way conclude, this book – which is both biography and t...

Gilbert Cesbron's play takes place in twenty-four hours, and begins and ends with the words of the title, 'Il est minuit, docteur...

This is a collection of two books in one, the first –  La Mère et l'enfant  – being a partly autobiographical account of a working-cl...

Literary hyperrealism isn't an expression that's frequently employed in English, and yet it's relatively common in French. It...

I suppose many of us, at least at some time or other of our lives, have collected something: stamps are a classic example, but then there...

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's La Nuit de fer  is a part-autobiographical novel set in the south of Algeria. The title of the book comes fro...

Anna Langfus's Les Bagages de sable  (trans. as The Lost Shore ) won the Prix Goncourt in 1962, which made her only the fourth femal...

Les Évaporés is Thomas B. Reverdy's Japan book, which he wrote at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto in 2012, and which is influenced by t...

Maurice Genevoix (1890–1980) was born in Decize (Nièvre), spent his early years in Châteauneuf-sur-Loire (Indre), and from 1929 largely l...

István Keszei (1935–84) was a Hungarian poet who died in Paris. He gained French nationality in 1973, and his early death at the age of f...

Wolfe Kaufman (1905–70) was born in Poland, moved to the USA, and made his home in France in 1954. He wrote for many American magazines....

Poet, painter, film-maker, playwright, philosopher and novelist, Isidore Isou Goldstein (1925–2007), who wrote as Isidor Isou, was born i...

Pierre Castex (1924–91) was a journalist and  writer of screenplays, cinema critic and journalist who worked for  Action , Libération , ...

Caroline Babert (1947–2010) was a journalist with Gala and a novelist who wrote Souviens-toi, Éléonore ! (1977), Les Méandres de la Mos...

Now that we live in the north-west of England, in the Manchester area, we only go back to Nottingham a few times a year. After learning tha...

Knut Hamsun's Hunger and George Orwell's Down and out in Paris and London , the experimental Franco-American writer Raymond Fede...

Joséphine Dard is Frédéric Dard's only biological child by his second wife Françoise, and this book is a huge love letter to her fa...

At one point in René Fallet’s L’Angevine the main character, the playwright Régis Ferrier (same initials) says that his friend’s wine t...

This takes place at the end of the era of Napoleon III, and is set in and around Forcalquier in Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, with the narrato...

I read Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit  many years ago, so don't remember too much of it, although as the novel is known by so...

This is not one of Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin detective stories: it's a mixture of  a science fiction novel set in the near f...

In the early morning of 5 August 1952 three people were murdered near the village of Lurs in Provence: the eminent scientist Jack Drummon...

The narrator of the partly autobiographical novel  Un secret  was originally called Grinberg, which obviously reveals the Jewish name. ...

This is, in effect, an autobiography / biography of Frédéric Dard/San-Antonio, who wrote perhaps 288  books, mostly as San-Antonio but a...

Casually looking for a job in Rome, the young Lucezia happens to find out that one of the most luxurious hotels in Rome want a laundry ma...

The year is 1997. Mathieu is only forty and has just had an operation for a tumour on his lung, and although it will take him some time t...

Son nom d'avant is in three parts, the second part being by far the longest. The first part is an obsessive view of a street, concen...

In this collection of five short stories by Hélène Lenoir – which make far from easy reading – there's a short but oddly immensely r...

L'Office des vivants is Claudie Gallay's first novel, and like the other two novels of hers I've read – Les Déferlantes  and...