In mid-18th century New York, Eben Adams, a young painter, despairs of his life and his talent. One Christmas Eve, as snow falls over the city, he has a mysterious encounter with Jennie, a child who is strangely alone in Central Park, and who sings to him a short and enigmatic song only seven sentences long.

Adams paints a portrait of this child who has become a woman. Is she really the child he met in the park? Is she a ghost or a fantasy? Where do we draw the line between dream and reality, truth and fiction? To what story do the figures painted by the artist belong? From painting to painting, the narrative takes on the unique, enchanted charm of a kind of winter and summer fairy tale with which Forrest extends and continues his work, in search for the perfect story. Forest writes beautifully about the power of art, its magic, its ability to revive hope despite everything.

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Le Havre in the 1980s, Anne is 16 and lives with her sister Irène, mother Maud and authoritarian, eccentric stepfather Jacques. Jacques may be sickly attached to good manners, wearing three-piece suits for every occasion and always expressing himself in a very chastened way, but he is nonetheless a spoiled stepfather. He envelops the girls in unconditional love and lavishes them with princely gifts far beyond his means. An improvising businessman in Abidjan, Jacques is sure his luck will change and success awaits him around the corner.

With a gentle melancholy, Florence Seyvos recreates the atmosphere of the 80s with the character of a man as flamboyant as he is eccentric, straight out of a Philippe de Broca film. This story of two teenage girls who discover the extreme vulnerability of adults has the colors of old Polaroids, both tender and heartbreaking.

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Un Perdant magnifique by Florence Seyvos, éditions de l’Olivier

“How do you conjure up a man whose memories and anecdotes – and aren’t memories anecdotes? – would have upset him or made him angry?” asks Denis Podalydès in L’Ami de la famille, Souvenirs de Pierre Bourdieu, a formative account that is as moving as it is humble.

In L’Ami de la famille, Souvenirs de Pierre Bourdieu, Denis Podalydès recalls his friendship with Emmanuel Bourdieu, the son of the famous sociologiste, through the places, objects, readings and collective actions that accompanied the end of his adolescence and the beginning of his adulthood. This friendship was at once a refuge, a pivot and a springboard for the future.

The shadows and tensions in Podalydès’s family are illuminated by the sociologist’s work on “l’espace social” and Algeria. Bourdieu has played a key role in the intellectual formation of the actor of the Comédie Française, and the tenderness and gratitude that can be felt from these pages are contagious.

L’Ami de la famille, Souvenirs de Pierre Bourdieu, by Denis Podalydès, éditions Julliard, collection Camera Obscura.

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Since January 2023, Lola Lafon has written a monthly column for the newspaper Libération. These columns, enriched by more intimate texts in which the ‘we’ gives way to the ‘I’, form the core of the book, and put recent events and our way of dealing with them into perspective.

“Ce livre est une histoire en cours. Celle d’un hier si proche et d’un demain qui tremble un peu. Ce présent qui bouscule, malmène, comment l’habiter, dans quel sens s’en saisir ? Comme il est étroit, cet interstice-là, entre hier et demain, dans lequel l’actualité nous regarde.” writes Lola Lafon on the book’s back cover.]

[This book is a story in progress. It is the story of a yesterday that is so close and of a tomorrow that is a little bit shaky. How do we live in this present that disturbs and shakes us, and how do we grasp it? How small is the gap between yesterday and tomorrow, where current events stare at us?”]

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Il n’a jamais été trop tard by Lola Lafon, éditions Stock.