It’s still very light, but we can feel the first publications of this new year dawning. Which turns out to be rich in titles, particularly on the fiction side. The figures have just fallen via the site of Weekly Books : 507 novels appear in January and February 2025 (+5.2% compared to 2024), i.e. 366 French-speaking fictions (+5.17%, including 70 first novels) and 141 foreign novels (+5.22%). The battle will be tough, as usual.
The first to stand out is by Haruki Murakami, The City of Uncertain Walls (Belfond), the Japanese’s first novel in seven years. This text is not completely new since in 1980, Haruki Murakami published a short story with the same title in a literary magazine and reused the plot in his SF novel The End of Timespublished in 1985. Then, Murakami decided to completely rewrite this story. At the beginning, a middle-aged narrator remembers his first love when he was a teenager. The young girl revealed to him the existence of a mysterious medieval city with high walls which protect shadowless inhabitants, clocks without hands, unicorns and a library in which one can consult old dreams. At the end of the summer, she vanished without a trace… How do you survive the disappearance of someone you love?
The second is none other than the great Jean Echenoz, who publishes his 17th novel, Bristol (Midnight). Once again, the Goncourt 1999 (I’m leaving) enchants us as he plays with language, metaphors, situations, feelings, human beings and nature – here oaks and plane trees exchange bellicose signals, a fly of the species Drosophila imputica focuses on a monograph by Kurt Neumann and, since we take a detour through southern Africa, elephants, lions, saurians, hippos… are there. As for his hero, Robert Bristol, a director not really in vogue, he is going to shoot a film in Africa with a young blonde actress, imposed by the novelist with 300 best-sellers, Marjorie des Marais… His feature film will flop memorable. We savor the baroque adventures of this comical story with an unclassifiable charm of which only Echenoz has the secret. He is one place ahead of the American thriller novelist, Lisa Gardner, whose new opus, Last Evening (Albin Michel), takes 18th place.
3837 winners
© / The Express
What about romance?
But let’s not forget the works of our romance authors, now subscribed to the list: such as Anne Huang, who lands in 5th place with the first volume of a new series Kings of Sin. Anger (Hugo Roman), by Mona Kasten, which places the third part of her saga Maxton Hall. Save us (Hachette Romans) in 10th place or even Emma Green whose To our beating hearts (Addictives) sneaks in at 14th place.
It’s much calmer on the testing side which only sees one new feature appear, Hold the line. 40 drawings for Charlie (2015-2025) (Gallimard), prefaced by the historian Jean-Noël Jeanneney and Kak, the president of Cartooning for Peace, project manager of this “Tract” published in tribute to the victims of the attacks of January 7, 2015.
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