Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese soldier who has never before left his village but is now sent to France to fight in the trenches of the First World War. When his friend Mademba is gravely injured in battle and begs Alfa to end his suffering, Alfa cannot bring himself to kill his friend. Consumed by guilt and anger, he descends into madness, severing the heads of German soldiers in a cruel ritual. He is eventually sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he reflects on his past life in Senegal.

In “The Safe House”, Christophe Boltanski tells the story of his family throughout the 20th century. The Parisian house where they lived and where he spent his youth plays a central role in the book. This house served as their refuge, particularly during the Second World War, when his Jewish grandfather managed to survive in a secret hideout.

The novel “All the Light We Cannot See” follows two main characters: Marie-Laure is a blind 16-year-old French girl, who, at the onset of the Second World War, flees to Saint-Malo in Brittany. She takes refuge with her great-uncle, a reclusive man who broadcasts secret messages by radio transmitter. The second protagonist, Werner, is a German orphan with a fascination for radio technology. At the age of 18, he is sent to the ‘Wehrmacht’, the German army, where he serves in a specialised team tasked with tracking illegal radio signals. Their stories intertwine during the Battle of Saint-Malo in 1944, when the US army lays siege to the town. A significant subplot involves the pursuit of a diamond known as the ‘Sea of Flames’.

“The End of Eddy” is an autobiographical novel in which Édouard Louis recounts his poor and unhappy upbringing in a small town in northern France, and the challenges he faced because of his emerging homosexuality.

Mathieu and his friend Libero abandon their studies in Paris to run a bar in a Corsican village. Mathieu’s grandfather lives in this village, after having spent 20 years in Africa in the French colonial administration. The bar becomes the heart of village life, largely thanks to the four waitresses. Meanwhile, Mathieu’s sister, an archaeologist excavating the Saint Augustine cathedral in Hippo (modern-day Annaba in Algeria), strongly disapproves of her brother’s decision to abandon his studies and move to Corsica.

“Pure” is a historical novel set in pre-revolutionary Paris. The protagonist, Jean-Baptiste, is a young engineer tasked with clearing the cemetery of ‘Les Innocents’ in the impoverished Parisian district of ‘Les Halles’ (now the ‘Place Joachim-du-Bellay’). His urban improvement project is met with both resistance and support from the local population.

“The Hare with Amber Eyes” traces the history of the Jewish Ephrussi family in the 19th and 20th centuries. It follows their rise as grain merchants in Odessa, their successes as bankers and art collectors in Paris and Vienna, and their downfall when the Nazis seized power in the 1930s, leading to their diaspora across England, the US, and Japan. A central thread in this family memoir is a collection of Japanese ‘netsuke’ miniature statues, purchased by one of the Ephrussis in the 1870s and passed down through five generations, ultimately reaching the author of this book, Edmund de Waal.

In her autobiography “The Years”, French Nobel Prize laureate Annie Ernaux reflects on her personal life, against the backdrop of major events in France during the years from 1941 to 2006, spanning from the Second World War through May 1968 to the modern day.

An elderly Belgian woman looks back on her live, particularly the years of the First World War, which she spent with her mother and brother in a village in northern France, near the Belgian border, unable to return home. She recalls the tragedies of the war, but also her struggles to break free from her bourgeois family, her envy towards her brother, who enjoyed greater freedom, and her romance with a British war photographer.

A mysterious stranger is murdered, and almost all the villagers seem complicit. Brodeck, the protagonist of this novel, is tasked with writing a report to explain and justify the murder. He reluctantly accepts but secretly weaves the story of the stranger into a second report about his own life – how he arrived in the village as a child, was deported to a concentration camp, survived and returned, but always remained an outsider.