Leïla Slimani: ‘This novel was very, very, very difficult to write’
To finish her semi-autobiographical ‘The Country of Others’ trilogy the French writer drew on deeply personal experiences of exile, prejudice and her father’s wrongful imprisonment
Related reading
Why Constance Debré shed marriage, law and a French political dynasty to write…
One of France’s most significant literary voices on pursuing a ‘higher purpose’ — and how the country’s judicial system crushes…
On the run from dictators, murderers and the Vatican — the best new thrillers
Including Saïd Khatibi’s vivid Arab noir, Elizabeth Heider’s tale of secrets and lies in Naples and a first outing for Maya…
Filmmaker François Ozon: ‘I made The Stranger to try and understand the book’
The French director was determined to break taboos of colonialism in Camus’s enigmatic novel — and modern-day France
Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood — the champion storyteller tells her own tale
Astringent, unsparing and generous by turns, the Canadian writer’s memoir is as compulsively readable as her best fiction
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein — Deborah Levy’s adventures with the…
A nameless narrator finds connections with the American pioneer of modernism in a confounding, compelling fiction-biography hybrid
The full and interesting lives of writers’ alter egos
Doctors, dairy farmers, failed novelists — how authors’ fictional selves take on an identity all their own, distinct from their…