romance and old hands in the spotlight – L’Express

And three new “genre” books, between romance and romanticism, in our fiction list. In the first place, the one that we no longer present, or almost, as she now remains without interruption in the best sellers, the Frenchwoman Morgane Moncomble. To say that she is a hit with her series Seasons (Hugo Roman) is not an empty word. The first volume has sold some 160,000 copies since September 2023, the second, published in January 2024, has already attracted 90,000 readers and now the 3rd, A spring to succumb to you, takes first place. In short, with the three volumes of her series present in the rankings of the week, Morgane Moncomble, 28 years old, who started on the Wattpad platform under the pseudonym “blunicorn05”, adorns herself with the jewels of the queen.

Irony of history, A spring to succumb to you is about a young, broke florist who is forced to marry to obtain financial help from her family and who decides to ally herself with a stranger. However, the second work entering our list (in 15th place), Dreamland Billionaires (volume II). Terms and conditions (HLab), by American Lauren Asher, deals with a man who, on the verge of becoming the CEO of the family media empire, must accept the will of the grandfather who wanted him to be married… No marriage for the third “genre” novel, The Realm of the Inferni (De Saxus, 18th rank), by another successful American, Kerri Maniscalco, but a story of a witch, a twin sister and murder. When “gastronomy, family, magic and romance mingle in this exciting story”, summarizes the review Booklist…

In short, it’s not easy to enter the best-seller paradise when you publish your first or second novel. Indeed, between these authors of romance with its variants, the long-standing bestsellers (Dicker, Musso, Dubois, King, Tesson, Rufin, Mathieu, Auster) and the resurrected ones (Frank Herbert, Gabriel Garcia Marquez), the places are expensive, very expensive.

A quick look at the tests? Three entrants also this week: a new kid, Bernard-Henri Lévy, with Loneliness of Israel (Grasset, 7th ang), who is saddened to see the world look away from the massacre of October 7, 2023 perpetrated by Hamas; the historian Gérard Noiriel, who published a Tract/Gallimard on current xenophobia entitled National preference. History lesson for the use of contemporaries, in which he notes that “history shows that the headlong rush into an increasingly repressive policy towards migrants, carried out in the name of ‘national preference’, endangers both the humanist values ​​of our Republic and the democratic principles of the rule of law”; finally, in a radically different register, the singer Lorie Pester, who recounts in Relive (Robert Laffont, 19th) his fight against endometriosis and adenomyosis and his choice to have his uterus removed to stop suffering…