Annie Ernaux, author of La place (Gallimard), has created a “complete” novel with Les années. Is this wonderful, illuminating fresco, Annie Ernaux becomes the archeologist of her own memory and plunges us, for the period of a lifetime, into the exploration of an entire era. Over six decades, at the rhythm at which one flicks through a photo album, History merges with the intimate and personal memories weave together along a collective history, life and writing intertwining. This is a dazzling chef d’oeuvre in which melancholy becomes the guardian of time and of memories.

Leslie Kaplan, born in Brooklyn, has been living in France since childhood. Her latest novel,Mon Amérique commence en Pologne, is the sixth installment of her series, Depuis Maintenant, started in 1996. This abounding autobiographical journey is divided into three different periods: childhood, the 1960s and ‘not so long ago’. From America (land of milk and honey) to the social upheaval of the 1960s, from Paris to Brooklyn, from the 1960s to the beginning of the 21st Century, this is a dazzling and breathtaking journey through the frenzy of living.

Born in Hangzhou in Chine in 1960, Yu Hua was first a dentist before making a name for himself as one of the most talented novelists of contemporary Chinese literature. In his latest novel, Brothers, he paints the portrait of a couple of half-brothers, parallel to describing the China of the past fifty years, including its most bloody tragedies and its most intimate scars. Through these characters, a whole generation is depicted with realism and exactitude.

Born in 1974 in Bonn, Juli Zeh, trained as a lawyer and has written eight novels, three of which have been translated into French. Through her novels, Zeh tackles the major questions of contemporary society such as violence, ethics, justice, identity and disorder.La fille sans qualités (Actes Sud, 2007) is a book about an entire generation in which she paints the portrait of German youth which saw its ideals shattered by the great tragedies of History and which can only express its pain through violence.