Books. Emmanuel Carrère's "Kolkhoze": the literary phenomenon of the new school year is available this Thursday.

It's the most anticipated book of the literary season: Emmanuel Carrère's Kolkhoze arrives in bookstores this Thursday. The author of L'Adversaire , at 67, is almost guaranteed, according to the literary world of Paris, to win one of the prestigious autumn prizes. It remains to be seen which one. He already won the Femina in 1995 for La Classe de neige and the Renaudot in 2011 for Limonov . His publisher, POL, is clearly aiming for the Goncourt, which had eluded him in his two previous attempts, with Le Royaume in 2014 and Yoga in 2020.

The 550 pages of Kolkhoz , written with the alert pen and taste for bittersweet introspection of his wrongs and passions that we know their author has, are almost unanimously acclaimed by critics.

Her mother, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse , former permanent secretary (who refused to use the term feminine) of the Académie française, is the common thread of her new book. The glorious destiny, as well as the dark sides, of this daughter of a Georgian, born Zourabichvili in Paris in 1929, and stateless in the circle of Russian émigrés, who resolutely chose France. The Russian word that serves as the title thus evokes the public and private lives of Hélène Carrère d'Encausse. Her death in 2023, at the age of 94, leaves the son plenty of room to detail less glamorous aspects, such as her loyal friendship with Maurice Bardèche, a writer who kept a low profile during the Occupation before claiming to be a collaborationist from 1945, or her painful dismay after the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army in 2022 . She was proclaiming everywhere that this war would never happen, based on what she knew about Vladimir Putin.

The writer also reveals the treatment of his father, Louis Carrère d'Encausse, an insurance executive who was permanently banished from the marital bedroom after his wife had an affair, and was subsequently subjected to jealous surveillance by her. He writes poignant pages about the end of life of each of these two parents, whom he loved very much. His father died four months after his wife, at the age of 95.

There are many novels in this 2025 literary season that feature mothers as their subject. This one, however, is unique in that it was honored with a national tribute at Les Invalides.