@clairechazal

📚 Un roman à dévorer cet été : « J’emporterai le feu », dernier volet de la trilogie marocaine de Leïla Slimani, prix Goncourt pour Chanson douce. L’auteure y livre, avec puissance et sincérité, une fresque intime de trois générations de femmes libres, entre Rabat et Paris. Une œuvre lumineuse sur l’identité, la transmission, et la force de la littérature.

♬ son original - Claire Chazal

Crosswords of Light

Like Olivia Dean’s Crosswords, the article’s ten pocket books sketch the quiet ache of trying to make sense of a world that keeps shifting under our feet: her song’s tender confusion—loving someone so intensely you half‑lose your own outline—echoes through Leïla Slimani’s Le Pays des autres, where Mia steps beyond Rabat to reclaim her life; through Eliot Ruffel’s Après ça, where adolescence becomes a raw, feral search for self; through Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism, which exposes systems that bend reality around power; and through Paul Thurin’s Jeanne de Leeds, where a young woman flees the cloister to rewrite her destiny. Just like Dean’s voice tracing the fragile beauty of wanting more than you can name, these March books illuminate how we fumble toward agency, stitching meaning from chaos, longing from silence, and a trembling kind of clarity from the shadows.

🎶 🌍 📚 🌒 🪞 🌬️ 🕊️ 🌾 🖋️ 📜 🌱 🏙️ ✨ 🔊 Crosswords - Olivia Dean

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📚 Pocket Books of March: New Releases That Illuminate Our Shadows

March opens like a window: a draft of air thick with unease, memory, and the desire to step elsewhere.

The pocket editions arriving this month capture the tremors of our time — political fatigue, intimate fractures, ecological dread, and the stubborn hope that something can still be reinvented. Ten books, ten ways of looking at the world without flinching.

🔥 Il n'a jamais été trop tard | It’s Never Too Late — Lola Lafon

Lola Lafon gathers two years of monthly reflections originally written for Libération, but the result is far more than a collection of columns. It is a book of vigilance and vulnerability, where she confronts a world saturated with political violence, feminist backlash, and the relentless churn of global crises. She observes “the ultra‑liberal air of the times” and its casualties, yet also the small gestures of resistance that persist in the margins. The tone is anxious but never defeated — a lucid, intimate attempt to stay awake in a moment that numbs.
Le Livre de poche — €7.90

🌡️ Après ça — Eliot Ruffel

In a nameless Norman town crushed by a suffocating heatwave, two teenagers drift through a few suspended days. Boredom becomes a landscape, a pressure point, a bond. Ruffel captures adolescent language with rare precision: sharp, unfiltered, yet capable of tenderness when it brushes against bruises, family secrets, or the clumsy gestures that console. The novel spans only a handful of days, but it captures that fragile instant when childhood cracks and friendship becomes a lifeline. A remarkably sensitive debut that lingers long after the last page.
Points — €7.90

🏙️ Le capitalisme de l'apocalypse | Capitalism in the Apocalypse — Quinn Slobodian

Quinn Slobodian traces fifty years of a chilling ideological project: a contractual capitalism that dreams of erasing the 20th century — its social protections, its collective ideals, its belief in equality. He shows how this model has already taken root in fragments, from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, from Liechtenstein to Canary Wharf, and how its architects imagine a world where collective will simply dissolves. The book reads like an investigation, sometimes like a political thriller, its implications dizzying. Slobodian exposes not only the mechanisms that brought us here, but the ones poised to spread further.
Points — €12.50

🕊️ Le pays des autres. Vol. 3. J'emporterai le feu | I Will Carry the Fire — Leïla Slimani

The final volume of Slimani’s trilogy The Country of Others follows Mia, who leaves Rabat for Paris in the early 1990s. Torn between freedom and loyalty, she navigates a world where every choice seems to cost a piece of herself. Slimani explores exile as an intimate tension: to leave, yes — but what part of you stays behind? Inspired by the author’s own family history, the novel blends personal destiny with collective memory. It closes the trilogy with a quiet, luminous melancholy.
Folio — €10.00

💎 Trash Vortex — Mathieu Larnaudie

Larnaudie plunges into the psyche of ultra‑rich survivalists preparing for climate catastrophe from the comfort of their fortified luxury bunkers. The novel oscillates between satire and dread, revealing how fear fuels fantasies of control, isolation, and technological salvation. Born during the pandemic lockdown, the book questions our relationship to the end of the world: does imagining disaster help us tame it? Larnaudie multiplies perspectives, bending dystopia into a mirror — warped, but unmistakably contemporary.
Babel — €11.40

🏰 Le Livre de Joan | The Book of Joan — Paul Thurin

Under a pseudonym, the author delivers a wildly entertaining medieval tale about Joan of Leeds, a young nun who escapes her abbey in 1318. The novel is erudite yet playful, mixing disguise, satire of the Church, comic set pieces, and reflections on freedom. Thurin revels in the tricks of storytelling, revisits religious texts with mischief, and offers a heroine who, without renouncing her faith, discovers the hypocrisy of those meant to guide her. A lively, theatrical coming‑of‑age story celebrating intelligence and resistance.
Le Livre de poche — €8.90

🌾Le Pays des herbes debout | The Land of Standing Herbs — Jean Villemin

Jean Villemin — sculptor, illustrator, and children’s author — imagines a strange territory called NoRa, reachable only by train, where a narrator is sent for a mysterious “program” related to vision. The place, bordered by an ocean of toxic reeds, reads like ecological fable, political allegory, and fever dream all at once. The novel unfolds like a hallucinated tale where landmarks dissolve and poetry rises from the gaps: a sliver of sky, a smell, a drifting fog. Villemin questions how we look — and what we refuse to see.
J’ai lu — €8.30

🌀 Monotobio — Éric Chevillard

For twelve years, Chevillard wrote down everything he did — without hierarchy, without selection. From this raw material, he crafts an anti‑autobiography that is funny, weary, and unexpectedly tender. The book toys with the very idea of self‑narration: what remains of a life when reduced to its most ordinary gestures? Chevillard turns this constraint into a literary game, where humor and precision shine. A reminder that no life is heroic — and that this is precisely what makes it worth telling.
Minuit — €12.50

🧭 Nous avons besoin d'un ailleurs qui n'existe pas | We Need an Elsewhere That Doesn’t Exist — Lucie Azema

Azema explores travel as a mental landscape, a territory of illusions and projections. She shows how we often set out in search of a mirror — origins, a lost paradise, a version of ourselves we hope to recover. Clear, elegant, and accessible, the book reflects on utopia, displacement, and the way places shape us. Azema seeks to “re‑enchant travel” without ignoring its traps.
Flammarion — €8.60

🪶 Ilaria ou La conquête de la désobéissance | Ilaria, or the Conquest of Disobedience — Gabriella Zalapi

Winner of the 2024 Femina Prize for high‑school readers, Zalapi’s intimate narrative retraces her family history with an unusual blend of clarity and secrecy. Her writing is both transparent and cryptic, attentive to silences, shadows, and inherited burdens. It is a book about disobedience as a founding gesture — not to break away, but to understand. Zalapi’s voice is gentle, incisive, and unmistakably her own.
Zoé — €8.50

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