Liana Levi Foreign Rights 2014
Liana
Christophe Reydi-Gramond
Levi
Fiction
An Explosive Lie
On September 21, 2001, ten days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, an explosion at a chemical plant south of Toulouse, France, left 31 dead and 2,500 injured. The authorities immediately pronounced it “99% an industrial accident.” And yet, so many gaps, contradictory witness reports, and unlikelihoods prevent some observers from totally accepting the official version. But alternative hypotheses—sabotage, an attack—aren’t enough to explain the events that took place that day. The apparent suicide of a journalist who knew too much leads anti-terrorism commissioner Clovis Lenoir into an investigation within an investigation where economic, political, and ideological stakes are all entwined.A physicist who had defected to the East in the 70s, a secret agent in search of vengeance, an arrogant chief of staff, a predatory ex-trader, and an old lady who still believes in the Revolution are just some of the characters he’ll come across in this case whose roots lie deep in the past. In this edgy and solidly documented thriller, Christophe Reydi-Gramond questions our relationship to the truth in a democratic society and explores the reasoning in reasons of State. . Crime novel. 360 pages. June 2014 All rights available
Christophe Reydi-Gramond was born in Bordeaux in 1964. He has traveled the whole world, spending a year in Senegal and ten in the Caribbean. After a period in journalism and advertising, today he manages corporate communications for a large French enterprise and lives in the country in central France. Before undertaking the writing of An Explosive Lie, he published two novels for young people edited by Coop Breizh under the pseudonym Raymond Grady.
Contact I Sylvie Mouchès I
[email protected] I www.lianalevi.fr
Liana
Aline Kiner
Levi
Fiction
Life on the Line
The story begins with three apparently unconnected characters: Marc, a young man who, on the death of his mother, leaves Paris to move into a caravan in the depths of the Drôme region of France; Gabriel, a photographer producing a photo reportage on the mythical necropolis of Abydos in the Egyptian desert; and then there’s Eva… a loner with an unusual calling. Somewhere between sculpture and archeological research, she reconstructs missing persons from thousands of years ago, restoring bodies and giving faces to those from the Australopithecus to barbarian kings. This time, it is a mysterious Gallo-Roman princess who awaits her in her lab. But Eva struggles to sculpt her face. Because Eva’s life is on hold. She lives ever wary of the enemy within: cancer. One day, seated at a café terrace after leaving the hospital, she’s intrigued by an odd sound: the insistent ring from a telephone booth. It keeps ringing. At last, she picks up the phone—a move that will change not just her life, but Gabriel and Marc’s as well. Months later, Eva begins the patient work of reconstructing the facts in an attempt to understand how the threads of their lives became entwined. Just as with the defunct of ancient Egypt, she achieves a journey from obscurity toward enlightenment. In a reserved yet life-affirming novel, along with her characters, fragment by fragment Aline Kiner reconstructs the personal face of our most intimate fears and the motivating forces of our lives.
Novel. 224 pages. April 2014 All rights available
Aline Kiner grew up in in the Moselle region of France and today lives in Paris where she is editor-in-chief of special issues of Sciences et Avenir. She has also published with Liana Levi The Hangman’s Game, a crime thriller awarded the Interpol’Art and Georges Sadler award (2011) and published in Germany by Ullstein.
Contact I Sylvie Mouchès I
[email protected] I www.lianalevi.fr
Liana
Emmanuel Grand
Levi
Fiction
End of the Line : Belz
His name is Marko. He’s in danger. The mafia is after him. He thinks he’ll find refuge on Belz island. One January day, Marko Voronine and three other Ukrainians leave their country for France, hidden in the back of a truck.The trip could be made in a few hours, but the Romanian thugs who are smuggling them are determined to have a good time with the young woman on board. The illegal immigrants manage to overpower them, take the truck, and get their money back. But they know the Romanian mafia is going to want revenge: the only way to shake them off is to separate. Marko sets out for Brittany.Thanks to a classified ad, he quickly finds work with the boss of a fishing vessel on Belz, a little island cut off from the rest of the world. When he gets there, he finds the place isn’t as peaceful as he expected. The seafaring trade has been hit hard, work on the trawlers is hard to come by, and the fishermen resent giving up a job to a foreigner. Strange stories are also disturbing the little community. Are they old legends, superstitions, or the supernatural? On this “island of the mad”, as it’s called in the region, men fear above all signs of the Ankou, the Angel of death. When a terrible crime is committed, the islanders suspect Marko of having stirred him to life. Without papers, plunged in a hostile environment, the young fugitive will find it very difficult to clear himself, to avoid the Romanian killers as well as the French police,sort fact from fiction,and deal with his own personal demons… A solidly constructed scenario, a spellbinding atmosphere, a universe that brilliantly unfolds : Emmanuel Grand steers this suspense from East to West at a wicked pace.
Born in Versailles in 1966, Emmanuel Grand spent his childood in the Vendée, about twelve miles from the Atlantic coast. The married father of four girls, he now lives in the Paris region. During the day, he is in charge of the website design for a large company. In the early morning, he writes. End of the Line : Belz is his first novel.
Crime novel. 368 pages. January 2014 Foreign Sales : Germany (Aufbau) Spain (Salamandra)
Press reviews “At times a sobering thriller, at others an inspired social novel, Terminus Belz deploys its beautiful architecture and musical style right to the last page.” Télérama “At one and the same time an excellent Breton, Ukrainian, Romanian, mafia-linked, fantastic thriller.” Le Figaro littéraire “The thriller revelation of the new season.” RTL
Contact I Sylvie Mouchès I
[email protected] I www.lianalevi.fr
Liana
Lucile Bordes
Levi
Fiction
Decorama
A seaside town with its encroaching concrete slab towers⎯what could be more ordinary? But George, fortyish and slightly obsessive, just can’t get used to the idea: he dreams of quitting his job in real estate, of defying the general trend headed by the town council which, since the closure of the shipyards, is placing all its hopes in these modern constructions. As luck would have it, the post of cemetery caretaker becomes available—the perfect little job to escape the stress of modern life and calm his neuroses. But on the day scheduled by the developers for the demolition of his grandparents’ building to make way for a luxury residence ,»Blue Horizons», George is sucked back in again—especially since it was he who’d found an apartment in just that building for Penelope, a former high-school girlfriend, now a very resourceful widow… In the full-blown designer showroom his town has now become, George superimposes the old on the new, in his mind’s eye recovering the walls with the posters of his past and of his pipe dreams. Once again we find all the originality and subtlety of Lucile Bordes’ style in a perfectly quirky novel. A ferociously burlesque tale about our memories of place and how they can entrap us. Novel. 160 pages. January 2014 All rights available
Press reviews
Lucile Bordes, born in 1971 in the Var region of France, now lives in La Seyne-sur-Mer. A lecturer at the University of Toulon, she also runs writing workshops. Her first novel, I Am the Marquise of Carabas, was published by Editions Liana Levi in September 2012 (Piccolo, February 2014).”
“Nothing could be lighter, more delicate, finer than this story of a cemetery. That’s the sign of a true writer, the ability to inject life right into death itself.” France Inter “Like a Don Quixote of faded glory, the melancholy protagonist Georges is an unforgettable anti-hero. Dazzling.” Le Parisien “In a minimalist fictional space, she succeeds in stirring up the murky waters of a burdened past that’s just been waiting to explode.” Le Monde
Contact I Sylvie Mouchès I
[email protected] I www.lianalevi.fr
Liana
Lionel Salaün
Levi
Fiction
Bel-Air
A moving novel of adolescence, friendship and love, of wasted youth, misunderstandings and the passage of time. On the outskirts of a small town in France in the 1950s, two friends, Gérard and the narrator Franck, live in the working-class housing project of Bel-Air. Once as close as brothers, over a period of four years, the two boys grow apart. Gérard, the only son of café owners, a racist fascinated by guns, dreams of serving his country in Algeria. As for Franck, raised by his mother after the desertion of his father, he hopes for nothing more than freedom. A new world opens up to him, thanks to Mr. Louis, a civil engineer crazy about jazz, and Cathy, the girl he falls in love with. When Franck receives his call-up for military service at the front in Algeria, he decides to do a break-in and run away with Cathy. But the police catch him red-handed: he will spend the next fifteen years behind bars. Forty-five years later, Franck has contented himself with the undemanding job of hotel night-watchman. With the housing project about to be demolished, Franck returns one last time to settle old scores with the one who surely betrayed him. It’s then that Gérard reveals it was Cathy who, caught by her parents with suitcase in hand, was the cause of his arrest. She was sent away to the south of France where she had had his child. In this touching novel, we once again find the style and themes close to the heart of the author of The Return of Jim Lamar : coming of age, brotherhood and loyalty, racism and war, social conditioning and the thirst for freedom.
Lionel Salaün lives in Chambéry where he was born in 1959. In order to devote his time to writing, he worked a string of odd jobs, from warehouseman or aquarium builder to sardine fisherman to photographer. His first novel, The Return of Jim Lamar, has been awarded twelve literary prizes (12 000 copies sold).
Novel. 224 pages. September 2013 All rights available
views Press reviews “A story of youth, male friendship, and betrayal in the France of the fifties.” Livres Hebdo “A deft and brilliant portrait of France at the birth of its housing projects and in search of its ideals at the outbreak of the war in Algeria.” Transfuge
Contact I Sylvie Mouchès I
[email protected] I www.lianalevi.fr
Liana
Paola Pigani
Levi
Fiction
Don’t Enter My Soul With Your Shoes On
The internment of Gypsies in France seen through the eyes of a young girl In 1940, Alba was a girl of fourteen. Her family made their living in a traveling show touring within a fifty-kilometer radius of Saint-Jean d’Angely, in Charente Maritime, France. Identity checks became restrictive and, in April, came the decree forbidding the movement of gypsies in time of war. Soon, the Kommandantur required that all gypsies in the region be rounded up under the surveillance of the French police.With hundreds of others, exhausted by hours of walking, Alba crossed the threshold of the internment camp of Alliers, south of Angoulème, in November. Little did she imagine she would spend six long years here, between horror and a thirst for life. In twenty or so chapters constructed like so many tableaux suspended in time, Paola Pigani recounts how Alba grew to womanhood despite the bleakness, how she and her family managed to love, to bear children, and to work amidst this madness of mankind. With reserve and grace, this first novel takes on a little-known page of French history and forms a vibrant homage to the Rom community.
Novel. 224 pages. September 2013 All rights available
Paola Pigani was born in 1963 to Italian parents who had emigrated to the Charente region of France. As an adolescent, she mingled with gypsy families and, in particular, a woman who would become the inspiration for the character of Alba. An old photo and bits of memories told by the descendants of this woman led to the writing of this first novel. She lives today in Lyon where she divides her time between writing and her work as an educator.
Pressviews reviews “A superb novel that leaves the feeling that a debt—to childhood, to Gypsies, to buried wounds—has in part been settled.” Le Monde des Livres “Political and poetic at the same time.” La Charente Libre Nominated for the Goncourt Prize for a First Novel
Contact I Sylvie Mouchès I
[email protected] I www.lianalevi.fr
