Read Like the French: 11 French Best-Sellers Now in English

Marc Levy has written plenty of international best-sellers, like If Only It Were True, a book that was turned into the box office hit Just Like Heaven. In Levy’s latest thriller, a journalist receives an anonymous letter alluding to a crime committed by her deceased mother. She soon meets a stranger who has received the same mysterious letter about his own mother. Together, they embark on a quest through the shadowy past of the Stanfields, a moneyed family full of unimaginable secrets.  

Swiss author Joël Dicker has been knocking out one international best-seller after another. His first big success was The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, a murder thriller that was later made into a TV mini-series. This latest book is an Agatha Christie-style page turner set in the Swiss Alps, involving Switzerland’s largest private bank and a shadowy counter-intelligence operation.  

Guillaume Musso is France’s best-selling author, having topped the charts for more than ten straight years. He writes fast-paced thrillers like this one, about a glamourous prep school girl who goes missing after an affair with her teacher. It has everything you want: gut-wrenching suspense, a twisting story with blindsiding surprises, and a narrator with a mysterious past. Many of Musso’s books have been translated into English, like Central Park and The Stranger in the Seine. 

Lemaitre began his career writing crime thrillers before winning the Prix Goncourt in 2013 for The Great Swindle. His latest book is the saga of a prominent French family in the booming postwar years, set in Paris, Saigon, and Beirut. Described as “an electrifying novel of passion, greed, murder, and revenge,” it is another page-turner from Lemaitre. 

An international best-seller and winner of the Prix Goncourt in 2019, this book describes the interior life of a man trapped in a prison cell, his history, and his relations with those dear to him.  It ranges from France in the sixties to the North Sea to the asbestos mines of Québec. As the story unfolds, the reader slowly learns how the protagonist ended up in prison.

An international best-seller, The Wizard of the Kremlin follows the life of the fictional Vadim Baranov, a close advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Baranov is based on the real Vladislav Surkov and the book provides a vivid account of modern Russia and Putin’s rise to power. The Wizard of the Kremlin was the runner-up for the 2022 Prix Goncourt. 

If you would like to understand the discontents that led to France’s Yellow Vest movement, this is the place to start. Described as “a caustic, frightening, hilarious, and politically incorrect novel about the decline of Europe and Western civilization,” Serotonin is classic Houellebecq, the novelist who best understands our modern age. He is also a bit of an acquired taste. For anyone looking for an introduction to Houellebecq’s books, The Map and the Territory, winner of the Prix Goncourt in 2010, is considered his best and most accessible work. 

This is an epic novel, with several narrators and multiple threads. One thread is the story of a young writer struggling to find his voice, another the story of a group of Africans in France living uncomfortably between two worlds, and still another a mystery about a long-ago writer who produced a masterpiece and then disappeared. It won the Prix Goncourt in 2021 and has just been translated into English. 

This book is a rarity: not only did it win the Prix Goncourt in 2020, it also sold over a million copies in France, becoming the first book to accomplish this double since Marguerite Duras’ The Lover in 1984. The Anomaly is the story of the passengers of an airplane to whom something impossible happens (think time travel), and how it changes their lives, in a different way for each person. 

An international best-seller, this is the story of the caretaker of a small cemetery in Burgundy. Her life is quiet and calm until an unexpected visitor arrives and stirs up her complicated past. Beautifully written and thought-provoking, it is a tribute to our power to heal. Perrin has recently written another French best-seller, Three, about three friends and the ties that bind them over decades. 

Paris native Camille would seem to have everything she needs for a happy life—a good job, a loving husband, and a wonderful child. But her life has become too routine, and she is searching for true happiness. This international best-seller is the feel-good story of how she finds it, a lighter take on Eat, Pray, Love.