2. Librairie Claudine (Wavre)
James Percival Everett, translated from English (United States) by Anne-Laure Tissut, olive editions, 288 pp., € 23.50 (publication on August 22)
Percival Everett had already caught us with his false thriller Punishment. In a completely different style but with beautiful common points, it comes back with us with James. James is a rewriting of Adventures the hicholery finthe great American classic of Mark Twain. The point of view is overturned: it is the slave Jim who tells us about the whole adventure.
Everett manages to perfection humor and irony. In Jamesthe slaves laugh at masters while scrupulously ensuring that they are expected of them. Survival question. The most visible manifestation is the language, because the slaves are perfectly bilingual. They speak “Little Negro” In the presence of whites and an English chastised and referenced between them. But this humor does not in any case obscure, on the contrary, the horror of the condition of slave and certain characters, on the fringes, between blacks and whites or between oppressors and oppressive, act subtly as revealing. All this without ever losing the narrative breath of a great adventure with multiple twists and turns. Great art. (Diane Platteeuw)
Back to school 2025: Ask the program
3. Librairie L’Alivain Public (La Louvière)
A Fire Dream Erik Larson, translated from English (United States) by Hubert Tézenas, Le Cherche-Midi, 720pp., € 26.50 (publication on August 21)
1860. On the occasion of the American presidential elections, the question of slavery crystallizes the tensions almost as much between the anti-slavery themselves as between the supporters of the maintenance of slavery and the abolitionists. To preserve the Union at all costs should be allowed the southern owners to recover, even in the northern states, their slaves on the run? At the very least, avoid demonizing slavers that exasperation pushes to demand independence? Or is the best way to keep the course for Lincoln to assert the universality of human rights to the south? Erik Larson by summoning multiple first-hand testimonies, in an immersive and almost always breathless non-fiction (700 pages anyway), makes us feel, during the 5 months preceding the Civil War, the inexorable rise of fanaticism, fear and hatred between states but also within parties, districts-even families.
4. Librairie Graffiti (Waterloo)
Nannies Séverine Cressan Éditions Dalva, 272 pp., € 21.50 (publication on August 21)
In NanniesSéverine Cressan immerses us in a timeless rural village, where survival goes through the sale of breast milk. We follow the fate of Sylvaine, a young mother forced to become a nanny for a city dweller. Her life changes when she collects an abandoned infant, weaving a visceral link with the child. On the death of the one for whom she was responsible, Sylvaine made the radical decision to replace the deceased little by the found child, thus overwhelming identities and lives.
Of a sensory writing, Séverine Cressan sheds light on the condition of these exploited, invisible, but united and inhabited women of incredible force. This first novel, harsh and poetic, reveals the intimacy, the filiation and the revolt of women crushed by patriarchy, recalling the universe of Franck Bouysse or Cécile Coulon. An overwhelming and unforgettable story. (Véronique Symons)
5. Bookstore Book’s (walking)
Where the stars fall Cédric Sapin-Defour, Stock, 400 pp., € 22.60 (published on August 13)
For this 2025 literary school year, an ode to the beauty of the moment!
Many of you had loved Its smell after the rainCédric Sapin-Defour’s first novel, here is the second.
This story is inspired by a real fact that occurred in 2022, when a paragliding accident suddenly separated Cédric from his wife Mathilde, in a Bolzano valley. The story follows the account of this dramatic fall and the physical and emotional reconstruction of Mathilde.
Sincere and touching portrait of a couple confronted with the test, the text is structured in scenes of life which alternate between the “before”, the “during day D” and the “after”.
The language is both purified and poetic, mixing sobriety and intensity.
Magnificent hymn to life!
“I dedicate my silence to you”, ultimate and abundant novel by Mario Vargas Llosa
6. Molière bookstore (Charleroi)
The hut in the trees Vera Buck, translated from German by Brice Germain, Gallmeister, 465 pp., € 24.90 (publication on August 20)
As in his previous work Wolf childrenVera Buck questions us about wilderness, whether vegetable or human, through a choral story mixing biology, family relationships and children’s disappearances.
The story follows a German family going to resort to Sweden, in a family home nestled in the heart of a primary forest. These woods are both reassuring and disturbing, hiding a multitude of secrets, a little like the couple formed by parents …
More than a thriller, this work points in family relationships the unsaid and diktats of adults on childhood.
Vera Buck, by her particular style and her inimitable talented talent, offers us an exciting and sometimes confusing reading experience! (Marie-Catherine Kieffer)
7. Papyrus bookstore (Namur)
Birds under ice Kaśka Bryla, translated from German (Austria) by Stéphanie Lux, the Quartanier, 312 pp., 23 € (publication on September 2)
In a skillful and breathless construction of back and forth in time, unless it is circular movements like the wheels of a skateboard, Kaśka Bryla leads us straight in the hearts of each of the six adolescents who will build, in a few months, particular relationships, then be linked by a dizzying secret. At the same time tense and impressionist, mysterious and shouting of realism, surfing on madness and the fantastic by sending some winks to Maupassant, the novel also, in passing, the educational institution with a touch of delight. Strange, original, thrilling! (Natacha eat)
8. PAX bookstore (Liège)
The beautiful dark Caroline Lamarche, Seuil, 240 pp., € 20 (publication on August 22)
In The beautiful darkCaroline Lamarche tells how two photos and two letters found by chance in the family archives will put it on the track of a mysterious ancestor and a family secret. Edmond, born in Liège in the middle of the 19th century, died very young and was strangely dismissed from the family tree. This discovery leads the narrator on the paths of secret. Troubled by the ambiguous beauty of the young man, she wants to understand what led Edmond in oblivion. Little by little, the investigation echoes his own story and awakens the mourning of an impossible love. Ghosts, memory and killed pain: Caroline Lamarche signs a novel full of tolerance, splendid and bewitching here.
9. Tropism bookstore (Brussels)
Once again, speak of a wave, and be overwhelmed by emotion with the fierce strangeness of this Obscure that Caroline Lamarche (Le Seuil) offers us, the rebellious panache and inspired by To the big ones by Jakuta Alikavazovic (Gallimard), the romanticism of High-folie under the obstinate pen of Antoine Wauters (Gallimard), with The empty house Also, from Laurent Mauvignier, absolutely impressive (midnight) or the short book by David Thomas A brotherso discreetly poignant (the olive tree) …
Talk about a wave, once again, and immerse yourself in the romantic with the immense James by Percival Everett (the olive tree-draw by Anne-Laure Tissut), the unrealrable Caledonian Road From Andrew O’Hangan (metalié-tradu by Céline Schwaller), the savage At the Wolves Table of Adam Rapp (the threshold-transformation by Sabine Porte), the brilliant and disturbing Our evenings D’Alan Hollinghurst (Albin Michel-Traded by David Fauquemberg)…
Again talking about a wave, and collect the treasures on the shore: the very poetic Trail of Julia Sintzen (Chort), the intriguing Flame, volcano, storm of Pierre Boisson (basement), the surprising Girls fighting by Rita Bullwinkel (the crossroads by Hélène Cohen), the nostalgic and so deliciously cruel Small black dress & pearl necklace by Helen Weinzweig (Cambourakis-Traded by Céline Leroy) or Clarificationpure jewel of the too rare carys davies (quay voltaire-draw by David Fauquemberg) … and again, again, this one, whose title escapes us but will surely come back …
Belgian publishers win their trials against three sites accused of hacking books
10. Tulitu bookstore (Bruxelle)
Eka asute. Ne flanche pas Naomi Fontaine, Éditions Mémoire d’Ancrier, 192 pp., € 19 (publication on September 2)
The booksellers of Tulitu are unconditional admirers of Naomi Fontaine. From Kussipan Written in 2011, this Aboriginal Quebec author manages to move us by telling his people innu abused since the white man arrived on the American continent.
In Eka asute. Ne flanche pasNaomi Fontaine asked the elders of his community to tell him about their life and those of the ancestors. This novel is made of fragments of happy or terrible memories that make us discover their culture, their relationship to nature, and especially their resistance to the white man who wanted to make their culture disappear by “integrating” them by force in our Western world. Some fragments are joyful, other hard, all are written in a poetic language that transports us. A moving novel that stays in the head for a long time. (Ariane Herman)
