Literary breakfast

Literary breakfast on July 23

During the sunny morning of July 23, the literary breakfast was held in Queen Elizabeth Park. Over a croissant, 8 participants discussed plagues, personal development and French people writing about the United States!

Check out the selection of participants from the July 23 literary breakfast and join us for the next one, August 20 at Queen Elizabeth Park!


Jennifer's favorite


Albert Camus - La peste

The story takes place in the 1940s and is set in Oran during the period of French Algeria. The novel chronicles the daily life of the inhabitants during a plague epidemic that strikes the city and cuts it off from the outside world. Camus' famous novel also seems to be an allegory of the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two.

Susanne's favorite


Joël Dickers - L'affaire Alaska Sanders

April 1999. Mount Pleasant, a quiet town in New Hampshire, is shaken by a murder. The body of a young woman, Alaska Sanders, is found on the shore of a lake. The investigation is quickly closed, with the police obtaining a confession from the culprit and his accomplice. Eleven years later, the case bounces back. Sergeant Perry Gahalowood of the New Hampshire State Police, who was convinced he had solved the crime at the time, receives a disturbing anonymous letter. What if he had been following a false trail? The help of his friend, the writer Marcus Goldman, who has just won a huge success with The Truth About Harry Quebert, inspired by their common experience, will not be too much to discover the truth.

Julie's favorite


David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . . Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter... From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.

Gary's favorite


Philippe Labro - l'étudiant étranger

Invited by a prestigious university in Virginia, a young Frenchman discovers the golden life of the college boys, their sports teams, their campus in a heavenly valley. It was the time of a wise America, the one before the explosion of morals and the crash of the sixties, and the young man quickly understood that he was still a "foreign student". He crosses lines, transgresses taboos, without even realizing it: first by making love with a young black teacher, April. Then by falling in love with a Boston heiress, Elizabeth, a whimsical and corrosive character... In a tone of clear sincerity, this formative tale resurrects, with humor and nostalgia, the fragile days of adolescence, when "everything was the first time.

Ronan's favorite


Carol S. Dweck - changer d'état d'esprit

Carol Dweck shows us that ability and talent alone are not enough, but that mindset has a critical impact on our life success. The most important thing to face and succeed in challenges is to approach them with a developmental mindset. And Carol Dweck will show you how. Based on research results, anecdotes from everyday life and biographical elements of famous people, the American researcher applies her method to various facets of life (education, social and love relationships, sports, business).

Grace's favorite


Alessandro Baricco - Soie

Around 1860, to save the silkworm farms contaminated by an epidemic, Hervé Joncour undertakes four expeditions to Japan to buy healthy eggs. Between the mountains of Vivarais and Japan, it is the clash of two worlds, a story of love and war, a marvelous alchemy that weaves the novel with impalpable threads. Long and dangerous journeys, impossible loves that continue without ever having begun, characters of desires and passions, the velvet of a voice, the sacredness of a magnificent and sensual fabric, and slowness, the slowness of the seasons and of unchanging time.

Anahita's favorite


Haruki Murakami - la ballade de l'impossible

A superb novel of initiation, a moving chronicle full of tenderness, poetry and nostalgia of the life of 6 students, in the Japan of the end of the 60s. In a plane, a song brings Watanabe back to his memories. His high school love for Naoko, haunted like him by the suicide of their friend Kizuki. Then his meeting with a young girl, Midori, who fights her demons by facing life. A tribute to long-forgotten loves, Haruki Murakami's first cult novel brings back the violence and poetry of adolescence.

Camilla's favorite


Emily St John Mandel - Station Eleven

In a world where civilization has collapsed after a devastating pandemic, a troupe of actors and musicians nomadically travels between small communities of survivors to perform Shakespeare. A repertoire that has come to represent hope and humanity in the midst of desolation.

Joséphine's favorite


Hervé le Tellier - L'anomalie

"There is one admirable thing that always surpasses knowledge, intelligence, and even genius, and that is incomprehension." In June 2021, a senseless event shatters the lives of hundreds of men and women, all passengers on a Paris-New York flight. Among them: Blake, a respectable family man who is nonetheless a hitman; Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star who is tired of living a lie; Joanna, a formidable lawyer who is caught up in her own failings; and Victor Miesel, a confidential writer who has suddenly become a cult. A virtuoso novel where logic meets magic, L'Anomalie explores that part of ourselves that we don't understand.





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