It would designate the 27th letter of the alphabet. The ampersand – also spelled “ampersand” – adorns with its elegant logogram the sign of this charttrain institution located in one of the oldest houses in the city which, it is said, would have seen Henry IV pass by on his sacred day. Link between past and present, the bookshop has been renewed this year after an important intervention that combines design libraries and sixteenth-century vaults. On February 9, the prince of Icelandic thrillers Arnaldur Indridason will sign his latest book there, the highly anticipated The king and the clockr (metallic). Opened in 1947 by Jean and Françoise Légué, the bookshop was taken over in 2008 by Frédérique Garcia (ex-Folies d’encre, in Montreuil) and Olivier L’Hostis, trained at La Galerne in Le Havre and who, for ten years, headed the Syndicate of the French Library. We leave it to this Malaussene fan to tell the rest of their adventures.
Best Selling: Terminus Malaussène by Daniel Pennac
Heralded as his latest work, Terminus Malaussène it would come to close the saga with 5 million readers that began in 1985. It would only come, for it could very well be that its final pirouette restores hope to the desperate reader of having to say goodbye to the indescribable tribe and its professional scapegoat, Benjamin Malaussene. Here it is the terrible Pépère who has the upper hand on the Parisian pavement, a character all the more formidable as one cannot help but fall under his spell. In They lied to me (Gallimard, 2017), the eldest of the Malaussene brothers found himself holding the entrepreneur Georges Lapietà in his arms, kidnapped after touching a golden parachute worth a few million euros. The protagonists of this obscure affair resume their service here, and the reader has, as always, the impression of being invited to a family reunion with a few infrequent uncles and cousins. Master of the baroque noir novel, Daniel Pennac delights us with this highly inspired Terminus whose success, given the attachment of his readers to these gunslinging uncles of literature, is assured.
Heart attack : Broken down d’Alessandro Piperno
Who has never dreamed of belonging to an environment different from that of origin? The only child of a mismatched couple, the narrator of this novel discovers ties to a more socially superior Jewish family than himself. A branch of his family tree that he knows after the death of his mother, who fell from a balcony. Removed from his father’s authority and entrusted to his uncle Gianni Sacerdoti, a brilliant lawyer who loves women and high tables, the young man sees possibilities open up before him, without being able to detach himself from an annoying feeling of imposture. Adored in Italy, too little read in France, Alessandro Piperno has no equal in dealing with serious topics with apparent lightness. With Broken downquestions from the point of view of its young hero the notions of identity and guilt as well as the complexity of family ties.
Discovery: Mumbai by Maria Saglio
Anthropologist and psychologist, specialist in issues of exclusion in India, Marie Saglio confronts us with an unknown face of this country and one of its capitals: Bombay. Modern, ultra-contemporary, the world-city reveals itself here in all its complexity. Born in India, Shiv works in London for a waste recycling company. Sent to Bombay, he finds his relatives there and discovers a country divided between wealth and extreme poverty, Islam and Hinduism, traditions and progress. Powerless in the face of corruption and intimidation attempts, Shiv is about to give up on his mission when the city finally lifts the veil on some of his secrets. Contrary to the phantasmagorical imagination often associated with India, Bombay stands out as a first novel sympathetic to the problems of our time.
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