The prize for winning the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award, is a cheque for €10, which winners apparently tend to have framed — perhaps at greater expense than the actual prize money — and displayed proudly on the wall of their office or writing nook.
The Prix Renaudot, meanwhile, comes with no cash award at all. But both prizes – along with the Prix Médicis, the Femina Prize, and the Académie Française Grand Prix du Roman — all boost book sales enormously.
To keep up with your well-read friends, here are some French books you should pick up next time you visit your friendly neighbourhood librairie.
La Maison Vide (The Empty House)
It needed just one round of voting by the jury of the Prix Goncourt to award the prestigious literary prize to Laurent Mauvignier for La Maison Vide — a forensic, fourth wall-breaking, fictional tour of his family’s past, starting with his great-great-grandmother, through the medium of heirlooms and mementoes.
The 750-page novel, which has more than an air of thriller about it, had earlier claimed the Prix littéraire Le Monde and the Prix des libraires de Nancy-Le Point, and was a Femina prize nominee.
READ MORE: Listed: The iconic books that make up France's cultural canon
Kolkhoze
There’s something about fictionalised family histories among this year’s award-winning works of French literature. Emmanuel Carrère’s highly romanticised story of four generations of his family — notably his mother, historian and politician Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, who died in 2023 — was awarded the Prix Médicis the day after the Prix Goncourt winner was announced.
Carrère won the Prix Femina in 1995 for La Classe de neige and the Prix Renaudot in 2011 for Limonov.
La Nuit au cœur (Night in the Heart)
Nathacha Appanah was awarded the 2025 Femina Prize for French Fiction for her novel La Nuit au cœur, which intertwines the fates of three women caught in a spiral of male violence, examining the murder of Chahinez Daoud, who was burned alive by her husband in 2021, as well as that of her cousin Emma.
The book was also nominated for the Prix Goncourt.
Passagères de nuit (Night passengers)
Yanick Lahens was awarded the Académie Française Grand Prix du Roman for Passagères de nuit, a rich and complex work that recalls slavery and the struggles of the resilient and defiant women of Haiti and New Orleans during the 19th century.
The leading characters of the tale are the author’s grandmother and great-grandmother — Elizabeth, born in New Orleans in 1818, who fled to Port-au-Prince after escaping an attempted rape; and Regina, born in Haiti some 50 years later, who recounts a life marked by poverty and racism in a letter to her dying lover.
Je voulais vivre (I Wanted to Live)
Journalist and author Adélaïde de Clermont-Tonnerre, a previous winner of the Académie Française Grand Prix du Roman for her 2016 novel Le Dernier des nôtres, delves into fiction for her Prix Renaudot-winning biography of sorts of Alexandre Dumas’ spy in The Three Musketeers, Milady de Winter, piecing together snippets of her past from the original classic tale, and filling in one or two gaps to present a portrait of a genuinely independent woman in an unreconstructedly masculine world.
Last year’s prix Rendaudot winner, Jacaranda, has sold more than 344,000 copies since its release and was one of the top-five best-selling books of 2024.
Asterix en Lusitanie
Comic books, graphic novels, call them what you will… France has a proud tradition of mixing words and pictures in books, and the 41st volume of the much-loved adventures of tiny powerhouse Gaul and his menhir-hauling friend — who this time head to Portugal — is guaranteed to be a Christmas favourite.
READ MORE: Bande dessinée: Why do the French love comic books so much?
Disclaimer: The above suggestions are in French. If you aren't quite ready to take on a thick French novel, here's a list of books about France that you can easily find in English.
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