This month, we’re reading the latest in French literature, with a pair of novels that channel old philosophical traditions into new perspectives on the country today.
The Tombs of Paris: A Novel
Violaine Huisman (Penguin Press, 240 pp., $28, April 2026)
Denis Huisman, a larger-than-life character in the heart of Museum of Parisis derived from a real-life scholar of the same name—a personality, according to his anniversary of 2021 in The world“worthy of Balzac.” Huisman, a businessman turned professional, made a name for himself in France with the company of Dictionary of Philosophersthe best 1984 book by philosophers in history that was loved by students and ridiculed by the academy. Some living philosophers wrote their own entries—including Michel Foucault, who, in his description of his work, “distinguished between the work of the writer and the composer, a distinction that remains controversial as the term continues. automatic fiction it was just invented.”
So writes Huisman’s daughter, the novelist Violaine Huisman. The younger Huisman is known for his auto design work, and in Museum of Parishe probes the boundaries of form, sifting fact and fiction to make sense of his glorious but painful family history and leaning heavily on imagination where memories are silent.
At the beginning of the novel, “Violaine,” the narrator, has just returned to Paris – after two decades in New York – to care for her father at the end of his life. He is a sophisticated and contradictory man—a charismatic, sarcastic, devoted family man, and a passionate womanizer, who may have helped introduce “new philosophical vocabularies” but was “disinterested in ideas.” He had spent his early years growing up in the Élysée Palace while his father, a Belgian Jew, was a high-ranking French official. The expropriation and exile of the family during the Vichy years are subjects that “Denis” returns to many times in his monologues, especially in his old age.
These are the stories, told and retold by her father, that Violaine cannot fully analyze: Did her grandfather get to the Cannes Film Festival, but was removed from the official record? Could this historical evil be connected to his grandfather’s grandmother (and her cat) taking the last seat in the car from Paris when the Huists fled the Germans?
Paris, in Violaine’s mind, is the repository of these stories. Each street has another part of the distant family story, as it holds memories of his own childhood, caused by the dysfunctional relationship between his father and his mother, who had bipolar. When he returns to Paris, he notes, “I was in many places at the same time, the most terrifying city.” Violaine’s Paris is a testimony to the inseparability of personal and national history.
In the last months of her father, Violaine thinks, in what could also be the thesis of her own book: “Soon, his stories – and stories like his – would remain only through artefacts and memories. The punishments he underwent under the Vichy regime would no longer continue in their warm, animated, if not contradictory, meaningless calculations, but they would be meaningless.” Only stories like his could provide “false truth.”—Chloe Hadavas
The Little Boat: A Novel
Vincent Delecroix, trans. Helen Stevenson (Mariner Books, 128 pp., $25, April 2026)
On the night of November 24, 2021, at least 27 migrants died in the English Channel while trying to cross from France to England in a dinghy. The boat broke down and began to sink about halfway through the trip; when the people on board called the French Coast Guard’s emergency number, their pleas for help were rejected. It was worst such incident recorded by the International Organization for Migration, which has collected data on illegal waterways since 2014. Most of the dead were Iraqi Kurds.
French philosopher Vincent Delecroix uses this real-life tragedy as the basis for his acclaimed novel, Small Boat. Originally published in France in 2023 as Shipwreckor “shipwreck,” the book was long-listed for the Prix Goncourt—French-language literature’s highest honor—that year. An English translation published in the UK in 2025 was shortlisted for the Booker International Prize. this month, Small Boat it finally debuts in the US.
In just 128 pages, Small Boat it is also a small book. But its small size belies its great moral power. Delecroix’s treatise on complacency and guilt in an unequal world has already found its place in the modern canon. It will certainly be useful for historians to look back in the 21st century, too. As Jeremy Harding, contributing editor at London Review of Bookswrites in the introduction to the translation, Delecroix “raises the uneasy possibility that each of us is involved in the suffering of immigrants.”
The protagonist of the story is an unnamed French Coast Guard radio operator who received more than a dozen distress calls from migrants on boats. For most of the book, he is interviewed by a police officer about the recordings of the conversation. One major quote is found in the historical record. Radio operator he told it immigrants: “Don’t you understand? You won’t survive. … I didn’t tell you to leave.” The comment brought him fame throughout France and created the basis for an interrogation that Delecroix developed in a terrifying way. At the heart of the conversation is the question of whether the deaths of the migrants were the result of the radio host’s “error of judgment or murderous intent”.
According to Small Boatthe radio operator repeatedly refused to send rescuers to the boat, claiming that the migrants were in English waters and therefore outside his jurisdiction, instead handing over the operation to the overwhelmed British Border Force. Whether or not he was right about the immigration scene, these details serve as a reminder of how strict adherence to bureaucratic techniques can sometimes lead to disastrous results. The episode sparked a “war of words” between Britain and France, with each accusing the other of not doing enough to stop the migrant deaths on CNN. information at that time.
The radio operator wonders if he is personally responsible for the tragedy, or if he has become a convenient target for a public eager to blame someone—and to avoid thinking more seriously about why the migrants decided to attempt the dangerous crossing in the first place. “So we came back to me again, and the idea that the cause of their death was – me. In other words, not the sea, not the immigration policy, not the business mafia, not the war in Syria or the famine in Sudan – me,” he says in the book, as part of a long internal monologue.
At the heart of the novel is the question of whether individuals are responsible for the larger, flawed systems in which they participate. “I was a little deaf in the machine that was malfunctioning,” the radio operator says. She describes herself as a loving single mother to a young girl, before continuing: “I think that was not enough, because the guards in the concentration camps loved their families too.” And to say that I did my job easily and carefully would not be enough either.
This is one of several oblique references Hannah Arendt. Just as he sought to expose “the bane of evil” after World War II, Delecroix has taken it upon himself to reveal what he calls “the nature of the prohibition monster” for our modern age.
At the end of the book, the radio operator looks beyond his workplace and addresses the France that now insults him. He wonders if the migrant crisis would attract the same level of notoriety if the public couldn’t cling to its “few expressions” as “the real cause of their deaths.” He accuses his colleagues of practical sympathy, which he calls “a stupid luxury practiced by people who do nothing, and who are moved by the spectacle of suffering.”
“Who is here on the beach? Who is watching this shipwreck from the mainland? Is it just me, no one else?” He says. “You’re all there. If I’d turned around I’d see you all, sunk on your sofas in the sand … watching without looking. … There’s no shipwreck without spectators.”Allison Meakem
April Releases, in a Nutshell
Ann Scott’s cult novel Superstarsoriginally published in 2000, translated from French by Jonathan Woollen. British crime veteran Anthony Horowitz returns with his latest whodunnit, Period of Death. Christiane Amanpour and Sylvia Poggioli serve as inspiration for the war writer in Devi S. Laskar’s heart Midnight, in War. The success of a pious family man is fueled by the horror business of Tamil writer Jeyamohan Pittranslated by Suchitra Ramachandran. Jiyoung Han’s first novel, Honey in the Woundturns to folklore to recover the voices of Korean women who resisted Japanese imperialism.
Nelio Biedermann’s Lazarustranslated from the German by Jamie Bulloch, it tells the changing fortunes of a blue-blooded Hungarian family. In Australian author Erin Van Der Meer’s first novel, The Scoopa hard-pressed New York reporter makes a deal with the devil. The fourth installment of the critically acclaimed Solvej Balle On Quantification translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. A hygienist escapes Charleston on an absurd trip through Europe in Will Cathcart’s. This Is How People Die. And Swedish author Hanna Johansson’s Hitchcockian thriller, Two bodiestranslated into English by Kira Josefsson.—CH
