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France treats the novel as a second parliament, a place where the questions that matter are put to the vote of the imagination. This running list gathers the finest contemporary French novels now in English, from newly crowned Goncourt and Renaudot winners to the modern masters of art, memory, and the vanishing countryside.

Every nation lifts one book above the rest each year and calls it the best it has. Gathered together, these verdicts map what the reading world values now, in forty languages at once, and show how much of it still waits in translation.

A woman buys a notebook to keep a diary, and that fragile thing outlives nearly everyone it touches. In The Use of Man, Aleksandar Tišma turns the Second World War into a machine whose true horror is not death but use, the slow conversion of people into instruments. This is the great Novi Sad novel of survival, and of the wounds that survival cannot heal.
In 1991 the Booker shortlist held six novels and not one was by a woman, in a year when women had written most of the fiction published in Britain. The Women's Prize was the answer to that absence, and its winners are among the best guides to women writing in English today.
Once a year, from a quiet room in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy chooses one writer out of all the languages on earth and asks the world to turn and look. A century of those choices is the nearest thing we have to a map of world literature.