In an upscale Paris apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families, the middle-aged caretaker Renée is an intelligent and cultured auto-didact who disguises herself as the stereotypical uneducated concierge to avoid suspicion from her employers. One of the residents, Paloma, is the precocious pre-teen daughter of a government minister. Having sensed life's futility early on, she has decided to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday. In the meantime, she masquerades as a mediocre student hooked on adolescent subculture. The narrative alternates between Renée's observations and Paloma's journal entries. The two discover their kindred spirits when a wealthy Japanese businessman named Ozu moves into the building and befriends them both. This moving and funny novel sold over a million copies in France and is now an American bestseller.

This gripping historical novel is also a cold case murder mystery. During World War I, the daily life of a small French town near the front is seemingly unaffected by the conflict until three civilian deaths occur--the murder of a young girl, the suicide of the charming school teacher, and the death in childbirth of the wife of the narrator, who is the local policeman. The deaths continue to haunt the policeman over the next 20 years as he struggles to make sense of the tragedies and the war.

In this debut novel (a bestseller in France in 2005), a lonely and nameless young woman works as a train announcer in Paris's Gare du Nord. Obsessed with a man who is attached to another woman, she wanders aimlessly through shopping, dinner parties and chance sexual encounters. As romantic possibilities increase with the man she loves, her behavior becomes increasingly troubled and erratic. A disturbing but compelling read.

Forced to reinvent herself at mid-life, narrator Myrium has no money or business experience, only a love of cooking. With a troubled past (revealed gradually throughout the novel) and several years as cook for a circus, Myriam opens Chez Moi, a tiny Parisian restaurant in which she also bathes and sleeps. Thanks to the help of an assortment of quirky characters, the eatery takes off as Myrium begins to sort out her demons. Satisfying and elegantly written.

This debut novel, a new take on William Golding's Lord of the Flies, won the First Novel Prize in France. When a young teacher is found dead outside his classroom window, an apparent suicide, his colleague Pierre Hoffman finds himself responsible for an extremely well behaved, fiercely cohesive, strangely emotionless and menacing middle school class. Over the weeks that follow, he receives a series of bizarre signals that cause him to wonder--suicide or murder?

After 30 years of listening to his customers' life stories in suburban Paris cafés, 56-year old divorced barman Pierre recounts his own tale in this absorbing and insightful novella. Fabre simply and eloquently portrays the dignity of everyday work, the value of friendship and the solitude of growing old.pasting

Four misfits (gifted, starving artist Camille, her socially awkward and aristocratic neighbor Philibert, his obnoxious but talented chef/roommate Franck, and Franck's ailing and neglected grandmother Paulette) share unexpected twists of fortune that connect them together as an alternative family in a romantic Parisian setting. This immensely appealing if sentimental novel was an international bestseller.

A young immigrant woman named Ahlème searches for work, love and meaning from her home base in the Paris projects. After losing her mother in an Algerian massacre years before, she became caretaker of her disabled father as well as her younger brother who as a teenager tends toward delinquency. Ahlème's toughness, determination and sense of humor make this an uplifting read.

The renowned Mont St. Michel off the coast of Normandy is the setting for this intriguing story  overflowing with architectural history, ghosts, two romances separated by a millennium, mystery and murder. A woman archaeologist in charge of a dig at the abbey gradually uncovers a medieval tale involving two Benedictine monks and a lovely Celtic healer who refuses to recant her pagan beliefs. A bestseller in France and Spain, the novel also won the prestigious Bookseller's Prize.

Orphan Seraphin Monge, an angelically handsome, muscle-bound military veteran, returns to his hometown in Provence at the end of the First World War. There he finds work in road construction, wins the hearts of two beauties, and finally learns the hidden truth about the massacre of his entire family 20 years before. The sole survivor, he begins to tear down their house, his inheritance, as he seeks vengeance for the murders. A darkly gripping gothic suspense thriller, The Murdered House was once a winner of France's Best Novel of the Year Award.

"On the coldest day on earth" in 1874 Edinburgh, Jack is born with a frozen heart. The midwife, who dabbles in mechanical wizardry, installs a cuckoo-clock in his chest to keep it ticking. She also adopts the boy, and eventually warns against the pain, bliss, and health risks (for him) of falling in love.... which of course he does at the first opportunity. This fantastical tale for adults and young adults is being adapted as an animated film. The audiobook, narrated by Jim Dale (of Harry Potter audiobook fame) is delightful.