Mélissa Da Costa takes the top step of the podium – L’Express

This will not surprise you, we will mainly talk to you this week about fiction. Two good reasons: on the one hand, nothing or almost nothing is moving on the essay side, where the now famous Philippe Boxho, a forensic doctor by trade, is wrapping up a breathtaking summer with his two works (The dead have the floor And Interview with a corpse, published by Kennes) in the firmament.

We will just point out the returns of Amin Maalouf and his Labyrinth of the Lost. The West and its Adversaries (Grasset) in 15th place, Emmanuel Todd, and Baptiste Touverey, The Defeat of the West (Gallimard), ranked 19th and Guillaume Meurice (In the ear of the stormSeuil) in the 20th. On the other hand, the first titles of the 2024 literary rentrée are already showing their faces.

With, first among equals, Stand up by Mélissa Da Costa, curiously published on August 14, which takes the top step of the podium with nearly 22,000 copies sold in four days. It should be noted, in passing, that her publishing house, Albin Michel, continues on its triumphant momentum, having been riding high all summer with the novels of Philippe Collin (The Ritz Bartender) and Thomas Schlesser (Mona’s Eyes). But let’s get back to our sales record holder (1.3 million copies in 2023, large format and pocketbooks combined), Mélissa Da Costa, who therefore takes the lead with her story of a forty-something who will finally leave his legitimate wife to settle down with his mistress when fate decides otherwise. It must be said that Albin Michel did not skimp by making a first print run of 180,000 copies (two new printings of 30,000 units are currently scheduled according to our colleagues at Books Weekly).

Behind her, Gaël Faye is not doing badly, far from it. Absent from bookstores for eight years and his Small Countryhe returns to the forefront with Jacaranda (Grasset), a superb novel about contemporary Rwanda, which notably deals with the trial of the Hutu genocidaires and the difficult inter-ethnic cohabitation. The third author to pull the chestnuts out of the fire is Kamel Daoud, whose new novel, Houris (Gallimard) takes 13th place. It deals with the Algerian civil war, this dark decade of the 1990s opposing “the touchy military and the bearded men of God”. And if we go down a little beyond the 20th rank, we see Maylis de Kerangal and her delicate novel on Le Havre appear in 21st position, Day of surf (Vertical) and in 25th and 26th place Olivier Guez with Mesopotamia (Grasset) and Alice Zeniter and her Hitting the epic (Flammarion).