Books published by Les Fugitives

'Louise Bourgeois talks, talks to herself, reviewing the scraps of her long life in all their disorder. This is the portrait, from memory, of a woman who devoted her life to her art, a life that was also the life of the century' writes J. Fremon.

My mother and I have been writing her obituary. We have been working on it for several years now. Before we started, she had already begun the project with my older sister. She wants to get it right.

In an anonymous French village a child loves to wander a forest where his mother may have disappeared. His father is speechless with anger; his grandmother is concealing her own story.

Over the course of a night in police custody, a young woman tries to understand the rage that led her to assault a refugee on the Paris metro. She too is a foreigner, now earning a living as an interpreter for asylum seekers in the outskirts of the city. Translating the stories of men and women who come from her country of birth, into the language of her country of citizenship, Sinha's narrator finds herself caught up in a tangle of lies and truths. Armed with an acerbic sense of humour she exposes prejudices on all sides.

A mysterious female figure keeps on appearing under a landscape painter's brush. A woman addresses letters to an absent loved one. Directing her reader and characters with the deftness of the Master of Suspense, Lucie Paye dramatises the power of unconditional love and the role of the unconscious in artistic creation.

Bestselling author of Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, joins the crowds commuting by bus in the city of love. Written in iPhone notes and inspired by Perec and Ernaux, this chronicle of the everyday in a year marked by terrorism and her loss of a pregnancy is also a love letter to Paris on the bus.

From the brilliant, sui generis Anne Serre - author of the celebrated Governesses - come three bewitching, thoroughly out-of-the-way tales.

In this new novel by the acclaimed author of Blue Self-Portrait, a poet-narrator existing on a diet of cannabis, bananas and books on oppression under the Third Reich muddles through a national state of emergency. Their ten lessons to today's young poets form a blistering treatise on survival skills for the wilfully idle.

A wry, erudite fable about the first painter to represent the saviour of humankind without his swaddling clothes with drawings by Louise Bourgeois.

Inspired by the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca, who tragically died while hitchhiking across Europe in a white wedding dress, to promote world peace under the motto 'marriage between different peoples and nations', Leger closes the third part of a trilogy begun with Exposition.

She is famous throughout the world, but how many know her name? You can admire her figure in Washington, Paris, London, New York, Dresden, or Copenhagen, but where is her grave? She was fourteen in the Paris of the 1880s, eking out a living at the Paris Opera as a petit rat. She also worked as a model, posing for painters and sculptors-among them Edgar Degas. Laurens paints a compelling portrait of Marie van Goethem and the world she inhabited; a time when art unsettled the hypocrisy of society. Her passionate inquiry takes us through the underbelly of the Belle Epoque, casting a light on those who have traditionally been overlooked in the study of art, and opening a space for essential questions.

The Countess of Castiglione was considered the most beautiful woman in the world in the late-19th century, and she became the most photographed woman of her time. A fascination with her life led the writer Nathalie Leger to weave together this imaginative biography of a woman who was over-exposed but never really understood in her own era.

The demented romance between an elderly white woman and a British-Jamaican boy, comes to horrific climax as white supremacy and class conflict collide on the streets of London.

'The best early training for a writer is an unhappy childhood,' Hemingway famously said. Julia Kerninon, one of France's most acclaimed young novelists, tells an altogether different story in a poetic account of her pursuit. Her journey through her formative years entwines the French and Anglo-Saxon literary traditions, resulting in a vibrant ode to reading, and to writing as a space for discovery (as well as a 'respectable occupation'), peppered with fine portraits of her disjointed yet loving family. From her native Brittany to the city of Shakespeare and Company, to a seaside cafe on the Atlantic coast, to Budapest and back, the author conjures a fluid, feminine answer to A Moveable Feast. On the 50th anniversary of the first Creative Writing Course in the UK, at UEA, this new book by a writer under 30 presents an old-school approach to authorship.

On the night following the terrorist massacre on the beach of Sousse, Tunisia, a woman writes an adieu to her homeland, which she feels forced to leave forever.

Taking her cue from self-portraits by women artists, Weil gives a playful twist to the concept of self-representation. Ranging from the 13th c. through the Renaissance to Frida Kahlo and Vivian Maier, each picture she describes acts as a portal to a significant moment from her own life, and sparks anecdotes tangentially touching on topical issues.

Half-memoir, half-philosophical treatise musing on translation's potential for humanist engagement by one of the great contemporary French translators, who has lived her life as a risk-taker, in post-war Germany and in Hanoi under bombardment in the 1970s.

A French woman haunted by her encounter with an American-German pianist-composer who is obsessed with Arnold Schoenberg's portrait, flies home with her lively sister and a volume of Adorno's letters to Thomas Mann. While the impossible heroine unpicks her social failures the pianist reaches towards a musical self-portrait with all the resonance of Schoenberg's passionate, chilling blue. A novel of angst and high farce, Blue Self-Portrait unfolds among Berlin's cultural institutions but is more truly located in the mid-air flux between contrary impulses to remember and to ignore. Noemi Lefebvre shows how music continues to work on and through us, addressing past trauma while reaching for possible futures.