The back-to-school literary season is already in full swing! At the end of August, the race for the autumn's top prizes begins. This year, almost 500 novels - 484 to be exact - are in the starting blocks: 344 novels written in French are published this fall, including 73 first novels, and 140 translations. Among this multitude of lines and words, we'd like to give you a clearer picture, with a small selection of 10 French or Francophone favorites, all with a link to foreign lands and origins, in the broadest sense of the term.

All the novels in our selection go in search of origins, most of them foreign, but they also tell of how it is to be a foreigner in a country other than your own, a foreigner in your own country, a foreigner to yourself.

The "event book" of the autumn season, favorite for the Prix Goncourt and acclaimed by the critics. Kolkhoze is the new "true story" of a family spanning four generations, covering more than a century of Russian and French history, right up to the war in Ukraine.

Emmanuel Carrère takes up this story, exploring the life of his late mother, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, intellectual figure and first female perpetual secretary of the Académie française, with "a consummate art of narration that succeeds in making their story our story". We travel through the Bolshevik revolution, the exile of the White Russians in Europe, two world wars, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Putin's Russia and its wars, all the while penetrating "a family saga at once wildly romantic and tragic, with destinies both prestigious and more modest, sometimes dark and tormented". A fresco that blends family archives, intimate memories and the major geopolitical events of the 20th century, in a sober, introspective style.

Nicolas Gaudemet, a specialist in the media and artificial intelligence, takes us on a completely different journey. Here we are in North Korea, where every move is monitored and two teenagers discover love.

Yoon Gi comes from a lower class, while Mi Ran's parents, members of the Party elite, have already promised her to another student. However, a glance exchanged at a public execution will turn their lives upside down. Under the omnipresent eye of the neighborhood brigades and State Security, "their clandestine passion becomes a silent resistance". How can you love someone in a dictatorship where the slightest deviation can land you in a re-education camp? How can you dream of freedom when everything invites submission? "A deeply moving novel, at once an intimate account and a political fresco, in which passion struggles to exist in the ordinary horror of a totalitarian regime", a North Korean Romeo and Juliet, which "questions the limits of courage, revolt and hope".

Already awarded the Prix Goncourt des lycéens in 2018, the new novel by David Diop, a Senegalese-born writer and French teacher-researcher, takes us to the end of the 19th century, when Bilal Seck, the novel's hero, completes a pilgrimage to Mecca and prepares to return to Saint Louis in Senegal.

A cholera epidemic decimates the region, but Bilal escapes, under the incredulous gaze of a French doctor who seeks to unlock the secrets of his immunity... All to no avail, as Bilal is already elsewhere, "carried by another story, the one he never stops chanting, an immense myth that has remained intact within him, transmitted by the great chain of speech that links him to his ancestors". From ancient Egypt to Senegal, a masterly novel about a man "on a quest to reconquer his origins and the immemorial sources of his word", a powerful tale, a quest for freedom.

Sudanese writer Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, one of the leading voices in the Arabic language, censored in his own country and living in exile between France and Austria, is publishing a novel this autumn that follows the odyssey of Sudanese migrants in Europe.

They dream of going to England, even if it means crossing the English Channel in a hot-air balloon. This was the dream of Adam, one of the oldest residents of the Calais Jungle, who has experienced everything from police assaults and cruel mockery by the locals to despair and spleen. To pass the time, he talks to crows, waiting to embark on yet another crossing to his dream country when the opportunity arises. A true immersion in the Calais Jungle, "a no-go zone where communities from Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia gather without mixing, where poetry also knows how to nestle", Le corbeau qui m'aimait is a "sensitive, committed and humanist novel".

Born in Paris to a French mother and Swiss father, Ghislaine Dunant spent her childhood and adolescence in Paris, New York and Basel. Her novel, published this year, takes the reader to the island of Tenerife.

A three-day meeting, in June 1964, between a Hungarian-born astrophysicist who had to flee Europe and go into exile in the United States, and a French mother, is turned upside down by a tragic event. While nothing should bring them together, their conversations about their separate pasts and the exploration of the island will open them up profoundly to each other. The astrophysicist's subjects (the sky, the universe, the Earth) resonate with the sensitivity of the woman who has always had a sensitive approach to people. Their mutual desire is matched by the power of the elements that surround them. A man and a woman who were never destined to meet, and yet, one evening and for a few days, "one of the most beautiful love encounters written in recent years".

With Tovaangar, Céline Minard, a writer who exploits different literary genres, but often science fiction, brings us "a luminous version of the world after" in a "salutary fiction of anticipation".

If human civilization is no more, its vestiges remain, enigmatic and insistent. The reigns of matter and life are entangled with new laws, new codes, a new language. Around what remains of a city, Los Angeles, renamed Hidden, whose geography is omnipresent, the novel describes a universe of unusual and fascinating beings. From deserts to canyons, forests and rivers, the heroes discover lush flora and fauna, as well as cultures that have forged a unique bond with their environment. Carried by a style of writing "at the crossroads of genres and of unparalleled scope, this epic novel takes us on an unprecedented literary adventure". A "grand demiurgic tale", a "philosophical and ecological fable about reenchanting the world".

Nathacha Appanah, a journalist and writer of Mauritian origin, whose family is descended from Indians who immigrated to Mauritius, lives in France. Here she publishes a "hard-hitting book" on the subject of feminicide, opening up the darkness of the human soul.

There is "the impossibility of the whole truth on every page, but the desperate quest for an accuracy as close as possible to life, night, heart, body and mind". The narrative interweaves three stories of domestic violence: Chahinez, a 31-year-old Algerian woman burned to death by her husband in the middle of the street near Bordeaux in 2021; Emma, the author's cousin in Mauritius, deliberately run over by her husband at the wheel of his car; and the domestic violence of which Nathacha Appanah herself was a victim, and which almost consumed her. La nuit au cœur walks a fine line between strength and humility, as Nathacha Appanah examines "the unbearable enigma of conjugal feminicide, when the dark night takes the place of love".

Is literature stronger than death? That's the question posed by Rachid Benzine, a Moroccan-born writer now teaching in France, in a novel in which, amid the smoking ruins of Gaza and the yellowing pages of books, an old bookseller waits.

What's he waiting for? Maybe for someone to finally stop and listen. For the books he holds in his hands are not just objects, they are "fragments of a life, fragments of a memory, the scars of a people". When a young French photographer points his lens at this old man surrounded by books, he is unaware that he is about to step through the looking glass. And so begins "the Palestinian odyssey of a man who has chosen words as refuge, resistance and homeland". From exodus to prison, from commitments to political disillusionment, via tragedies, his voice carries "in a world where bombs try to have the last word". But he reminds us that "books are our greatest chance of survival, not to escape reality, but to fully inhabit it. As if, in the midst of chaos, a man who reads were the most radical of revolutions.

Akira Mizubayashi, a French-speaking Japanese writer, is a French alumnus who began his studies in Tokyo, finishing them in Montpellier before entering the Ecole normale supérieure on rue d'Ulm!

In his new novel, he offers a particularly moving story, while continuing to explore his familiar themes of "the disaster of war-mongering nationalism, and art as an essential recourse against the folly of mankind". Here, the author transports the reader to Tokyo in December 1944. Employed in a postal sorting office, the hero, Ren Mizuki, meets two other students who share his passion for European art and culture: Yuki, who will become his companion, also a painter, and Bin, a violinist destined for an international career, who will forever remain his brother in arms. In 1945, Ren is called up to Manchuria to fight in the inferno. Disfigured and mutilated, he returns convinced that he'll never be able to hold a paintbrush again. Will Yuki's love be able to reverse his destiny?

Senegalese-born writer Fatou Diome stages a meeting with the man to whom she dedicates all her books, her grandfather. Between recollections and invocations, powerful emotions and gripping language, "this tender, intimate tale reveals the secret of a truly strong, foundational relationship".

The Senegalese novelist, who made a name for herself in 2003 with her unforgettable Le Ventre de l'Atlantique, has now achieved international recognition. Among the main themes explored in her works, notably the impact of colonization, identity and exile, immigration and the relationship between France and the African continent often emerge. In this new novel, the writer returns to this "oceanic vein" through a tale that resurrects the unforgettable and endearing figure of a grandfather, a fisherman in the Saloum. With "nostalgia and infinite tenderness", she paints an "intimate portrait of this courageous grandfather, from whom little Fatou learned the art of living, always above the tumult of the waves crashing on the shifting sands of life".

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