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 Monuments of Paris: A Novel
Violaine Huisman (Penguin Press, 240 pp., $28, April 2026)
Denis Huisman, the larger-than-life character at the heart of The Monuments of Paris, is drawn from the real-life academic of the same name—a personality, according to his 2021 obituary in Le Monde, “worthy of Balzac.” Huisman, an academic-turned-entrepreneur, made his name in France with the Dictionnaire des Philosophes, a bestselling 1984 primer on philosophers throughout history that was beloved by students and mocked by the academy. Some living philosophers penned their own entries—including Michel Foucault, who in his description of his work, “distinguished between the author function and the author person, a distinction still controversial at a time when the term autofiction had just been coined.”
So writes Huisman’s daughter, the novelist Violaine Huisman. The younger Huisman is known for her autofictional work, and in The Monuments of Paris, she probes the limits of the form, sifting through fact and fiction to make sense of her illustrious yet pained family history and leaning lavishly on imagination where the archives are silent.
At the novel’s start, “Violaine,” the narrator, has just moved back to Paris—after two decades in New York—to care for her father at the end of his life. He’s a grandiose and contradictory figure—a gourmand, a raconteur, a devoted family man, and an inveterate womanizer, someone who may have helped introduce “new philosophical vocabularies” but was “not interested in ideas.” He had spent his early years growing up in the Élysée Palace while his father, a Belgian Jew, was a senior French official. The family’s dispossession and exile during the Vichy years are subjects that “Denis” returns to often in his monologues, especially in his old age.
These are the stories, told and retold by her father, that Violaine cannot fully parse: Did her grandfather really found the Cannes Film Festival, only to be stripped from the official record? Could this historical infelicity actually be connected to her grandfather’s mistress (and her cat) taking the final seat in the car from Paris as the Huismans fled the Germans?
Paris, in Violaine’s mind, is a repository of these tales. Each street holds another piece of distant family lore, just as it harbors memories from her own childhood, made tumultuous by the dysfunctional relationship between her father and mother, who was bipolar. When she returns to Paris, she notes, “I was in too many places at once, the city a frightening palimpsest.” Violaine’s Paris is a testament to the inseparability of personal and national histories.
In her father’s final months, Violaine thinks, in what may as well be the thesis of her own book: “soon enough, his stories—and stories like his—would only remain through artifacts and archives. The indignities he was subjected to under the Vichy regime would no longer live on in his feverish, animated, if contradictory accounts; they would be fixed, but breathless, bloodless.” Only stories like his could offer “a truth beyond mere facts.”—Chloe Hadavas
Small Boat: A Novel
Vincent Delecroix, trans. Helen Stevenson (Mariner Books, 128 pp., $25, April 2026)
On the night of Nov. 24, 2021, at least 27 migrants died in the English Channel while attempting to cross from France to Britain in an inflatable dinghy. The boat malfunctioned and began to sink about halfway through the journey; when people aboard called a French Coast Guard hotline, their pleas for help were rebuffed. It was the deadliest such incident ever recorded by the International Organization for Migration, which has collected data on illicit transit in the waterway since 2014. Most of the deceased 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 Naufrage, or “shipwreck,” the book was longlisted for the Prix Goncourt—the Francophone world’s highest literary honor—that year. An English translation released in the United Kingdom in 2025 was then shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. This month, Small Boat is finally making its U.S. debut.
At just 128 pages, Small Boat is also a small book. But its slim size belies its overwhelming moral force. Delecroix’s treatise on complacency and culpability in an unequal world has already earned its spot in the modern canon. It is sure to become indispensable for historians looking back at the 21st century, too. As Jeremy Harding, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, writes in an introduction to the translation, Delecroix “raises the unsettling possibility that each of us is complicit in the suffering of migrants.”
The protagonist of the story is the unnamed French Coast Guard radio operator who received more than a dozen distress calls from migrants aboard the dinghy. Throughout most of the book, she is questioned by a police officer about the recordings of those exchanges. One key quote is found in the historical record. The radio operator told the migrants: “Don’t you get it? You won’t be saved. … It wasn’t me who told you to leave.” That comment earned her notoriety across France and formed the basis for the interrogation that Delecroix so chillingly fictionalizes. At the heart of the conversation is the question of whether the migrants’ deaths are due to the radio operator’s “error of judgement or murderous intent,” he writes.
According to Small Boat, the radio operator repeatedly declined to send rescuers to the dinghy, claiming that the migrants were in English territorial waters and thus not in her jurisdiction, instead outsourcing the operation to an overwhelmed U.K. Border Force. Whether or not she was correct about the migrants’ location, this detail servers as a reminder of how strict adherence to bureaucratic technicalities can sometimes have fatal consequences. The episode led to a “war of words” between Britain and France, which each accused the other of not doing enough to stop migrant deaths in the channel, CNN reported at the time.
The radio operator wonders whether she bears personal responsibility for the tragedy, or if she has become a convenient target for a public eager to pin the blame on someone—and to avoid thinking more critically about why the migrants decided to attempt the dangerous crossing in the first place. “So back we came to me again, and the idea that the cause of their death was – me. In other words, not the sea, not migration policy, not the trafficking mafia, not the war in Syria or the famine in Sudan – me,” she says in the book, as part of a long internal monologue.
At the heart of the novel is the question of whether individuals bear responsibility for the larger, flawed systems that they participate in. “I was a small cog in a machine that had malfunctioned,” the radio operator says. She describes herself as a loving single mother to a young girl, before continuing: “I guess that wasn’t enough, since the guards in the concentration camps loved their families too. And to say that I did my work simply and conscientiously wasn’t enough, either. Because Eichmann did his work just as conscientiously as me.”
This is one of several oblique references to Hannah Arendt. Just as she sought to expose the “banality of evil” after World War II, Delecroix has taken it upon himself to uncover what he calls “the origin of the monster of banality” for our modern era.
At the book’s end, the radio operator looks beyond her workplace and addresses the France that now reviles her. She wonders whether the migrants’ tragedy would have attracted the same level of infamy if the public had not been able to latch onto her “few phrases” as “the true cause of their deaths.” She lambasts her compatriots for performative empathy, which she calls “an idiotic luxury indulged in by people who do nothing, and who are moved by the spectacle of suffering.”
“Who is here on the shore? Who is watching this shipwreck from the mainland? Is it really just me, no one else?” she says. “You are all there. If I turned round I would see you all, sunk into your sofas on the sand … watching without watching. … There is no shipwreck without spectators.”—Allison Meakem
April Releases, in Brief
Ann Scott’s cult novel Superstars, originally published in 2000, is translated from the French by Jonathan Woollen. British crime icon Anthony Horowitz returns with his latest whodunnit, A Deadly Episode. Christiane Amanpour and Sylvia Poggioli serve as the inspiration for the war correspondent at the heart of Devi S. Laskar’s Midnight, at the War. A pious family man’s success is fueled by a grotesque trade in Tamil author Jeyamohan’s The Abyss, translated by Suchitra Ramachandran. Jiyoung Han’s debut novel, Honey in the Wound, turns to folklore to reclaim the voices of Korean women who resisted Japanese imperialism.
Nelio Biedermann’s Lázár, translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch, chronicles the changing fortunes of a blue-blooded Hungarian family. In Australian author Erin Van Der Meer’s debut novel, The Scoop, a hard-pressed New York journalist makes a deal with the devil. The fourth installment of Solvej Balle’s much-lauded On the Calculation of Volume is translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. A sanitarium patient escapes Charleston for an absurdist journey through Europe in Will Cathcart’s This Is How People Die. And Swedish author Hanna Johansson’s Hitchcockian thriller, Body Double, is translated into English by Kira Josefsson.—CH
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