Who will receive the Goncourt Prize? The list of contenders was further reduced this Tuesday, October 28. The academy has just revealed the names of the four finalists: night in the heartby Nathacha Appanah (Gallimard), kolkhozby Emmanuel Carrère (POL), The beautiful darknessby Caroline Lamarche (Seuil) and The empty houseby Laurent Mauvignier (Midnight).
In this final square family stories are intertwined. In the genre of family sagas, Emmanuel Carrère writes (again) about his mother and Laurent Mauvignier paints a portrait of three generations of women, on his father’s side. Nathacha Appanah analyzes the mechanisms of male violence and returns, among other things, to the femicide of her cousin. When Caroline Lamarche questions, in her fiction, the figure of a mysterious ancestor and homosexuality kills in the family.
Nathacha Appanah – Night in the Heart (Gallimard)
This is perhaps his most personal story. In her twelfth book, Nathacha Appanah weaves together three stories of women victims of domestic violence. That of his Mauritian cousin Emma, murdered in 2000. That of Chahinez Daoud, a young woman burned alive by her husband in 2021 and whom the writer has never met. And hers, an influential relationship that she lived between the ages of 17 and 25 with a writer thirty years older than her.
With these three investigations, the author of Tropic of violence dissects the processes of violence, whether social, psychological or sexual. In this way, he returns to his own experience under the clutches of a narcissistic pervert, without ever falling into voyeurism. Published last August, this staccato-paced text questions literature and rethinks its role (its impotence?) in the search for truth.
Emmanuel Carrère – Koljoze (POL)
A literary tomb of 560 pages. Two years after the disappearance of his mother Hélène Carrère d’Encausse in 2023, Emmanuel Carrère paints an uncompromising portrait of this woman who, the daughter of Georgian and German-Russian immigrants, received all the honors of the Republic until she became permanent secretary of the French Academy. The title is a gentle reference to childhood: the kolkhoz designates, in family legend, a refuge full of affection: the mother’s bedroom, where Carrère’s three children slept in the absence of their father.
This monstrous book seems to contain several: that of great history and that of family history, with its returns on Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, from the Bolshevik revolution to the current war in Ukraine. The author mixes tender and unkind reflections about the matriarch, without falling into gratuitous reckoning. The author, already winner of the Renaudot Prize in 2011 for limonov – also remember that the publication ofa russian novel He had made his mother suffer and they did not see each other for several years.
Caroline Lamarche – The Beautiful Darkness (Threshold)
Edmond haunts family memories. We don’t know much about this ancestor, a mining engineer, except that he was banished from his family and died at just 31 years old, in 1865, under circumstances that are still unclear. Starting from an intriguing photograph of this “beautiful dark man”, the narrator begins an investigation that also leads her to her own story: she finds out, after eight years of married life and two children, that her husband is homosexual. Since then he has openly lived his relationship with his partner. She writes that this situation “is putting up with the closet, it’s the domino effect of homophobia.”
Rossel Award for dog day and Goncourt of the news for We are on the edge, The 70-year-old Belgian author questions this time the place of “homosexual wives”, collateral victims of a “homophobia that forced homosexuals to marry or commit suicide.” In essence, it also builds a great novel about love, its comings and goings and its disappointments.
Laurent Mauvignier – The Empty House (Midnight)
1976. In this building there is a piano, a chest of drawers with chipped marble, a Legion of Honor, photographs from which a face has been cut out with scissors… and a large void. The mansion, inherited from Laurent Mauvignier’s father, had not been opened for twenty years. When the author discovered these objects he was 9 years old. His discovery becomes the starting point of a great family story.
The writer thus gives life to several generations of women. Her great-great-grandmother Jeanne-Marie, “in charge of making jams and darning socks.” His great-grandmother Marie-Ernestine or “Boule d’Or”, a pianist with a frustrated dream. Her grandmother Marguerite, dispossessed during the Liberation for having become engaged to a German during the Occupation, who disappears from family photographs. For 752 pages, the author ofnight stories progresses by trial and error in this book, at the intersection of historical documentation and fiction. Already winner of the 2025 Le Monde Literary Prize, the Nancy-Le Point Booksellers Prize and the Landerneau Prize, The empty house It stands out as one of the great novels of this fall.
The winner will be announced on November 4, as tradition dictates, at the Drouant restaurant in the second arrondissement of Paris.
If the lucky winner only receives a check for 10 euros, the Goncourt is a guarantee of a certain notoriety and multiple sales. In 2024, Kamel Daoud, winner of the prestigious award, sold his book houris to 450,000 copies.
Source: BFM TV
