This feisty, bizarre novel (with one of my favorite covers in recent memory) follows a private investigator entrusted with tracking down a fugitive adolescent girl named Valentine. She enlists the assistance of the Hyena, an incredibly perceptive butch lesbian recognized for her ability to solve the most difficult situations. The novel switches points of view and takes the plot in progressively unexpected areas, such as the radicalization of youth and white nationalism, or one of the heroes' softly LGBT awakening. It's a sardonic, humorous novel with tragic twists, and Despentes uses her acute writing abilities to swap viewpoints and allow the riddles to come together on their own for the sake of the reader.

The Mauritian author talks about four teenagers in Port Louis, four young people who wish to flee their doomed neighborhood, growing up too quickly as they become increasingly confident that they would never be able to go. Eve is the novel's focal point, the captivating girl eager to sell her body to survive, with Savita by her side, steady and kind. Saadiq observes Eve from afar, his poetry stumbling in the poisonous macho teen environment he inhabits, while rebellious Clélio fantasizes of his brother eventually transporting him over the water to France. This tale about sapphic love, teenage hopes dashed by imperialist and racist power systems, and a world designed to shatter young people is both tragic and beautiful.

Ananda Devi tells the story of four young Mauritians caught in their country's never-ending cycle of terror and violence with terrible honesty and beautiful passion. Eve out of Her Ruins is a devastating glimpse at Mauritius that visitors don't see, as well as an investigation of the creation of personhood on society's outskirts.

Translated by: Jeffrey Zuckerman
Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32068085

David Diop's novel At Night All Blood Is Black is set in France. It was first published in French by Éditions du Seuil on August 16, 2018, and it won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens that same year.

The International Booker Prize winner for 2021 is a brilliant, brief novel about the harsh sorrow of war. Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier fighting with the French during World War I, is unable to bring himself to mercy-kill his dying companion. This tragedy haunts him and begins to alter his psyche - he begins to mutilate the bodies of troops, alienating people around him as a result of the war's dehumanization and horrifying bigotry. It's a great, brilliantly written short story about the ambiguities of war.

Translated by Anna Moschovakis
Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50403480

In Montreal in 2002, a young music enthusiast with a gambling problem finds work as a dishwasher at a posh restaurant. In some ways, it's a simple notion, yet it's rife with the fears of modern-day youth. He is being pursued by his gambling debts, his falsehoods, and his failing grades. The pace is unrelenting as he finds himself immersed in a world of late-night personalities and coworkers, as he battles to keep up with both his work and the world around him, mind racing as he tries to escape his need to gamble.

As heard on The Sunday Edition with Michael Enright on CBC. It's October 2002 in Montreal, and winter is on its way. A graphic design student with a gambling problem goes for the first job that offers a paycheck: dishwasher at the elegant La Trattoria, despite being past due on his first freelancing contract and trapped in falsehoods to his family and friends. Though he feels out of place in the posh dining room, having been warned by the manager not to enter through the front and being assessed coolly by the waitstaff in their tailored shirts, nothing could have prepared him for the tension and noise of the kitchen, or the clamor and steam of the dish pit.

Philippe Besson's novel Arrête avec tes mensonges is set in France. It was released in 2017 and garnered positive reviews. It was awarded the Maison de la Presse Prize. Molly Ringwald translated it into English as Lie With Me, and English-language reviews praised it.

The protagonist is going about his typical day when he comes across a young man who resembles his first love. Besson's poetic prose brings his recollections to life. He recalls his affair with Thomas, their attachment, and their covert rendezvous. Thomas is remote and detached – socioeconomic inequalities divide them, and Thomas knows Philippe will leave their small-town life one day. They are separated by heteronormativity and class. Finally, the greatness of this work rests in its beautiful language and capacity to express to the reader the longing, anguish, yearning, and pain of being concealed.

Translated by Molly Ringwald

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40539136

This 2021 release tells the frantic narrative of Paradise, an exquisite family farm where Blanche and her brother are reared by their harsh grandma Emilienne. Blanche's ardent love for the country will drive her in one direction, while her passion for the ambitious Alexandre will pull her in another. There's something mythological, something strange, and maybe something wrong about Paradise.

A frightening book about a family of women who are captivated by their land. Emilienne's existence revolves around Paradise, her remote property at the end of a meandering route. Following the untimely deaths of her daughter and son-in-law, she farms alone, relying solely on her courage and her property, as well as her two small grandchildren, Blanche and Gabriel. Blanche gets older and has an even closer connection to her house and the generations of women who have guarded it before her, such as her mother and grandmother.

Translated by Tina Kover

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54812506

This debut novel by mathematician and Oulipo member Michèle Audin retraces the lives of French mathematicians through World Wars I and II across multiple generations. The story shifts stylistically from chapter to chapter, resembling a book, fable, historical study, or a journal at points, locking and unlocking codes and concluding in a thrilling, unique reading experience. Michèle Audin is the author of various mathematical theories and history books, as well as a book about her anti-colonialist father's torture, disappearance, and death by the French during the Battle of Algiers.

The format alters dramatically over the book's pages, from diary entries to tales to research notes, all of which come together. And it has a few morsels and jewels concealed in its code for people who are interested in arithmetic.

Translated by Christiana Hills

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26196054

Négar Djavadi's Disoriental (French: Désorientale) is a 2016 French-language book published by Éditions Liana Levi [fr]. Tina Kover translated the novel into English, and Europa Editions released it in 2018. It was the author's first published novel.

It's the intergenerational saga of the Iranian Sadr family, recounted via the spinning thoughts of queer, fierce, punk protagonist Kimiâ as she waits in a Parisian reproductive clinic waiting room. It's a family narrative portrayed through a web of stories, experimenting with memory and the tangled knots of hearing a story from many different points of view without being there. She is the daughter of two academics who resisted the Shah's and subsequently Khomeini's regimes, and she escaped Iran with her mother and sisters when she was young, aiming for Paris. The protagonists' tales match Djavadi's, adding a piercing authenticity to the story and tone.

Translated by Tina A. Kover

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40170500

Valérie Mr éjen's Black Forest is a grieving novel that is neither dark nor emotional, but rather an exquisite and wryly comic brace against the blank. Mr éjen pursues death's terrible and twisted journey through the lives it touches with a bizarrely detached closeness, drawing out every conceivable meaning—or non–meaning—along the way.

Valérie Mréjen, a writer and director, writes about a sequence of bizarre deaths in this tiny collection, writing about loss and sadness in detached but nevertheless very genuine ways. When a divorced father and his children go to his ex-apartment wife's to pick up clothing, they discover her body in bed. Mréjen sprinkles in little vignettes of death as the elder daughter grows older and surpasses her mother's age of death, and as she dreams, recalls, and wonders, he tries to acquire a sense of what death is like, at its broadest and yet most zoomed in.

Translated by Katie Shiren Assef

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42999446

Mauvignier shows readers how the Algerian War, always present yet always repressed, has sickened the emotional and moral life of everyone it touched—and France itself, perhaps. The epigraph, like the novel, suggests that wounded men may even become the wound itself.

The Wound is a gripping, emotionally charged story about French troops fighting in Algeria during the Algerian War of Independence. We begin in the present, where village alcoholic "Woodsmoke" causes a commotion, but then we jump back in time to his time in Algeria, to the doubt, dread, and anguish he felt. The book depicts crimes done by all sides – it depicts the horrors of war, the abandonment of its veterans, and the humiliation and anguish they endure as a result of their involvement in its combat. It's a narrative about occupation and failing to defend those you promised to protect, and it's terribly applicable now.

Translated by Nicole Ball and David Ball

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21944991-the-wound

Nicole Brossard's iconic work, first published in 1987, returns to this novel in a new edition. Mauve Desert, a major piece in Canadian and feminist writing, is a must-read for both readers and authors.

In Part One of Québécois author Brossard's postmodernist, twisting tale, queer Mélanie flees her mother and her mother's lover, Lorna, by driving through the Arizona desert. She adores the desert, the vista, and the open air. In part two, a lady comes across the text from part one and sets out to discover its meaning and origins in order to interpret it. And, in part three, she does translate it: but it's not the same as the original, and the variances underscore the intricate task of translation and the difficulties of putting life into words.

Translated by Susanne De Lotbiniere

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/580293

Myriam, a French-Moroccan lawyer, has returned to work after having children. When Louise enters her life, she believes they are extremely fortunate – she is the ideal nanny, cleaning their Paris apartment, devoted to the children, staying late, and working extra hard. But you know from page one what Myriam does not: Louise will end up murdering the two youngsters in her care. The story's unraveling is gloomy, revealing the dehumanization, class strife, and power dynamics that are part of how wealthy parents treat those who labor for them. Slimani is a writer to keep an eye on, and this mystery/thriller received a plethora of prizes upon its initial release.

The Perfect Nanny is a character-driven psychological thriller that deftly handles universal issues such as parenting, domesticity, class, and race. In certain countries, The Perfect Nanny is known as Lullaby. Myriam and her husband, Paul, are the primary protagonists. Mila and Adam, their two children, live with them in a small Parisian apartment.

Translated by Sam Taylor

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38330854