I love paper books. I hope they will resist the onslaught of e-books
in the same manner radios and bicylces have survived and indeed thrived
in the days of TV and cars.
I do intend to give away some of my texts as computer files here, though.
My American editor published one novel, The Fighter, at Bloomsbury USA,
then she was “let go.” I failed to convince the person who took
over that my other stuff was also worth publishing.
Just click a title to
download the file in PDF or ePub format. If you have an iPad, put the ePub file in your iTunes folder. It should appear in your iPad’s library next time you synchronise.
The narrator of this wild tale has a knack for languages. He learns the language of chimpanzees and adopts two young apes, Big Sister and Little Brother.
He does speak with a heavy foreign accent, so the chimps just don’t understand when he says: “Please tidy up your room… Stop throwing mashed potatoes at the ceiling…”
This was my first published novel. The publisher, l’École des Loisirs, stopped selling it after nineteen years and allowed me to give it away on my website.
This is the story of Marilyn Monroe as told by herself, from her early childhood to the day when she gobbled one pill too many.
She’s a strong-willed girl in Poland, a student in Paris, a member of the French Résistance during the second world war, a prisoner of the Gestapo… She falls in love with Lonek, known as “Jacques” in the Résistance. Three weeks after they decide to have a baby and name him Jean-Jacques, the Germans arrest Lonek and send him to Auschwitz. He is a ladies’ man; a jealous mistress denounced him…
This novel is based on my mother’s story. It is the first book in a trilogy. The two other books are based on my father’s story and on mine. They are great favorites with my faithful readers and were featured on a full page in Libération, a leading French daily.
Lonek(pdf)
Lonek is the son of an inn-keeper in a
remote Polish corner of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He admires the hussars
and lancers who come to the inn, drink his father’s famous beer and
dance with the beautiful “bar-girls.” Although he’ll become
a bright student, a virtuoso pianist and eventually a doctor in Paris,
he’ll always be fond of the kind of plain people you meet in an inn—and
he’ll never be able to resist the lure of a beautiful woman.
During the war, he enrolls in a communist Résistance network. While
the police sets a trap in his apartment and catches his group, he is lucky
and escapes… until his jealous mistress denounces him.
In Auschwitz, he survives the first terrible weeks because he is strong
and resourceful, then he finds a job as a doctor in the camp’s hospital.
He hides in the camp when the Germans evacuate it. He is the first person
to come out of the camp alive, three days before the arrival of the Russian
army.
In 1939, when German bombs begin to fall on Warsaw, Kama is ten years old. She tells how she flees with her parents to Byelorussia, then Ukraine, Azerbaidjan, Georgia, Armenia, Turkmenistan. They settle eventually in a village in Uzbekistan, in Central Asia. She learns more than if she was going to school, and so do we.
This novel is based on a true story
Nine eleven(pdf)
Nine eleven(ePub)
This book is based on interviews I made in New York City some months
after the Twin Towers were attacked. I wrote an English version, then
translated it into French. My American publisher was interested, but then
chose to publish The Fighter instead. I kept the rights for the English
language, so I can put the full text on my website.
The French version became quite a success and was voted best young-adult
book of the year in Belgium. Only the original for The Fighter sold more
copies. While the French book was published in a young-adult series, a
Spanish translation was published as a book for the general public.2
Albeniz(pdf)
A friend of mine made a movie that was a complete failure in France.
But then Miramax bought the rights. The original title, Fausto,
refered to a famous Tour de France champion whom nobody in America ever
heard of, so it was changed to À la mode.
“Miramax belongs to Walt Disney, my friend told me. I need to think
of a new film. This is quite an opportunity, you know.”
“I have got a good story for Walt Disney. Isaac Albeniz.”
“Who?”
“Albeniz. He was a famous Spanish pianist and composer. My story
is about his childhood. He escaped from home to go on tour by himself
when he was ten years old, then again when he was twelve.”
I told him more about Albeniz. He asked me to write a script. By the time
my script was ready, À la mode had failed as miserably
in America as in France.
“It came out the same week as The Titanic,” my friend told me.
The cat in the maze(pdf)
This tale is somewhat similar to the Albeniz
story, except the main character is a cat instead of a music composer.
While Albeniz only goes to South America, this little cat travels around the world and has all kinds of strange adventures.
The fence(pdf)
This short story is translated and adapted from a radio drama I wrote some years ago for the French public channel France-Culture. It is based on the true story of a Jewish girl who survived World War II by being hidden. As the mother has to sing a Yiddish lullaby, she was played by Talila, a well-known French singer of Yiddish songs.
This is a book(pdf)
Many people, in France and other countries, have studied English for years in school but cant’t read a short newspaper article or technical manual in English. This suspenseful and entertaining story progresses from simple words and short sentences to not so simple words and somewhat longer sentences, taking the reader along, so that eventually he or she can read my other books—then Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse and Dickens.
Otherwise you’re dead (pdf)
It so happens that my parents had unusual and interesting lives, so I wrote novels about them. Then I thought that their friends also had interesting lives. I spent a few years interviewing them at length, then I wrote this novel. War and Peace would have been a good title for this book, but it wasn’t available.