World prose

Béatrice Kahn

Underwear. The compelling prose Les Dessous (Underwear, 2020) follows three different girls, all of them on the cusp of adulthood. In a small French town in 1963, Elisabeth, hidden under a café table, listens to adult conversations. It’s the day of her friend Thérese’s funeral and she is also reading the diary of Henriette, a Jewish girl, who suffered persecution during the war. Secrets kept undisclosed in the French post-war small town are gradually coming to light. The world of teenage girls is confronted with the adult world, with war and collaboration, conformity and social violence, with large and small betrayals.

Dorothy B. Hughes

In a Lonely Place. Psychological noir fiction with a criminal theme, which depicts post-war Los Angeles and the life of the upper middle class. The protagonist, Dix Steele, is a former World War II pilot living off his uncle’s money. At first, he appears to be merely someone, who is overly concerned with his appearance and places great emphasis on his own importance, but after meeting his former war buddy Brub, his wife Sylvia and after the encounter with an actress called Laurel, it becomes clear, that he can hardly control his aggression and resentment towards his own fate…

Evgenia Nekrasova

Skin. The novel written by the young Russian writer Evgenia Nekrasova is a story of two women, a black slave from the South of the U.S.A. and a Russian serf whose life stories overlap.

In the South of the U.S.A. a female slave is born and named Hope. Her mother tries to save her from the same fate as she herself has faced. However, they get separated and the new owner takes Hope away from America. Meanwhile in Russia a girl named Domna is born into a serf family and, being the youngest daughter, is cherished and spoilt. Than one day a carriage takes her away – her owner lost her in cards.

Oksana Vasyakina

Wound. The prosaic debut by the poet Oksana Vasyakina is a documentary, autobiographic text which turns around the author’s journey with her mother’s ashes from the Volgograd region to her native Siberia.

Jean-Christophe Rufin

King Sable’s Trip Around the World. The novel is inspired by the life and the memoirs of the traveler Maurice Benyovszky (1746-1786), who is considered a national hero in Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia.

Maylis de Kerangal

Mend the Living. Since her birth the prominent French author has been close to the sea and she projected her passion powered by her literary mastership into the novel aptly titled by an emblematic quotation from Anton Chekhov’s drama Platonov.

Amin Maalouf

The Disoriented. One night, a phone rings in Paris. Adam learns that Mourad, once his closest friend, is dying. He quickly throws some clothes in a suitcase and takes the first flight out, to the homeland he fled twenty-five years ago. Exiled in France, Adam has been leading a peaceful life as a respected historian, but back among the milk-white mountains of the East his past soon catches up with him.

Novely a povídky

Mavis Gallant

The Latehomecomer. In this selection of 13 stories which were published in The New Yorker, Gallant shows herself to be one of the century’s most accomplished, and least conventional, writers of short fiction.

Maryse Condé

I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem. This wild and entertaining novel expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two years later. Maryse Condé brings Tituba out of historical silence and creates for her a fictional childhood, adolescence, and old age.

Honoré de Balzac

Farewell and Other Stories. Balzac is often remembered as the author who, despite his romantic beginnings, embraced realism and critically portrayed the life and morals of French society in the first half of the 19th century. The collection includes eight of his finest novellas and short stories on a wide range of topics and fully demonstrates the mastery of suspense and revelation that were the hallmarks of Balzac’s genius.