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Reading List · French Fiction & NonfictionThe Best French Authors to Read
Saint-Exupéry crashed a plane in the Libyan desert in 1935 and walked for four days before a Bedouin found him; eight years later he published a story about a boy who lives on an asteroid. Annie Ernaux writes down what her mother's coat cost. Philippe Petit strung a cable between the World Trade Center towers at dawn and stayed on it for forty-five minutes.
Below are five French authors worth reading, in the order they were born, with what each is actually doing and which book to start with. Every one of them has a full guide on this site: complete bibliography, publication order, and where to begin.
Five authors, and where to start with each
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
1900–1944 · Lyon
He flew mail routes for Aéropostale over the Sahara and the Andes in the 1920s, and everything he wrote came out of that work: night flights, engine failure, the long silence between radio checks. Night Flight won the Prix Femina in 1931; Terre des hommes won the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française and, as Wind, Sand and Stars, the American National Book Award in 1939.
The Little Prince was written in New York and published there in 1943, in English and French at once; France did not see it until 1946, two years after he disappeared over the Mediterranean on a reconnaissance flight. It is shelved with children's books and is mostly about grief, work, and what adults stop being able to see.
Start with The Little Prince (1943). Then Wind, Sand and Stars (1939) — the same mind without the fable.
All Antoine de Saint-Exupéry books →Albert Camus
1913–1960 · Mondovi, French Algeria
He grew up poor in Algiers, raised by a mother who could not read and was partly deaf, and kept goal for Racing Universitaire d'Alger until tuberculosis ended it at seventeen. The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus both appeared in 1942, one a novel and one an essay, arguing the same thing from two directions: life is not handed to you with a meaning attached, and that is not a reason to stop.
He edited the Resistance paper Combat during the occupation, took the Nobel Prize in 1957 at forty-four, and died in a car crash three years later with an unused train ticket in his pocket. He refused the existentialist label all his life, and his break with Sartre in 1952 over The Rebel was public and permanent.
Start with The Stranger (1942), about 120 pages. Then The Plague (1947), or The Fall (1956) if you want the coldest one.
All Albert Camus books →Annie Ernaux
Born 1940 · Lillebonne, Normandy
Her parents ran a café-grocery in Yvetot, and the education that moved her out of their class is the wound the whole body of work keeps returning to. She calls the method auto-socio-biography: her own life used as evidence about a period, written flat, without metaphor, checked against photographs, prices and what people actually said.
The Years (2008) covers 1941 to 2006 and never once says “I” — it is written as “we” and “she”, the collective memory of a generation seen through one woman. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022, the first French woman to do so.
Start with A Man's Place (1983), about ninety pages, which won the Prix Renaudot. Then The Years (2008) for the big one, or Happening (2000) for the hardest.
All Annie Ernaux books →Philippe Petit
Born 1949 · Nemours
On 7 August 1974 he stepped onto a cable strung between the towers of the World Trade Center and stayed up there for roughly forty-five minutes, crossing eight times, before the police took him off the roof. He had spent six years planning it. He had already walked between the towers of Notre-Dame in 1971 and across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1973.
He writes in English, and the books are about method rather than daring: how to plan something illegal for six years without telling the wrong person, how a knot actually works, what practice is for. To Reach the Clouds, his account of the towers, was reissued as Man on Wire after the 2008 documentary won the Academy Award.
Start with To Reach the Clouds / Man on Wire (2002). Then Creativity: The Perfect Crime (2014) if you want the working method.
All Philippe Petit books →Emmanuel Carrère
Born 1957 · Paris
In 1993 he wrote a letter to Jean-Claude Romand, a man who had pretended to be a doctor at the World Health Organization for eighteen years and then killed his wife, his children and his parents when the lie was about to collapse. The Adversary came out of that correspondence, and it is as much about Carrère's discomfort in writing it as about Romand.
He began in fiction and wrote a biography of Philip K. Dick, then stopped inventing: since 2000 the books are reported, first-person, and openly unsure of their own motives. Limonov won the Prix Renaudot in 2011; The Kingdom (2014) is a six-hundred-page investigation of the early church by a man who no longer believes.
Start with The Adversary (2000). Then Lives Other Than My Own (2009), the warmest, or Limonov (2011) for the reporting.
All Emmanuel Carrère books →Where should you start with French literature?
- The one everybody has already met — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943)
- The shortest way into the big questions — Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942)
- Class, memory, and one family — Annie Ernaux, A Man's Place (1983)
- True crime that distrusts itself — Emmanuel Carrère, The Adversary (2000)
- A plan that took six years — Philippe Petit, To Reach the Clouds (2002)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
Who is the most famous French author?
By global readership, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The Little Prince is one of the most translated books ever published and still sells in the millions every year. By literary reputation the usual names are Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust and Albert Camus. By contemporary standing, Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022.
Which French author should I read first?
Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942). It runs to about 120 pages, needs no background in French history or philosophy, and it is the book the rest of his work argues with. If you would rather start with nonfiction, Annie Ernaux's A Man's Place (1983) is shorter still.
Why are Victor Hugo, Proust and Flaubert not on this list?
Because this page only lists authors who have a full guide on this site, with the complete bibliography and a starting point. The nineteenth-century French canon is not covered here yet. Hugo, Proust, Flaubert, Simone de Beauvoir, Alexandre Dumas and Jules Verne all belong on any longer list of French authors — they are simply not ones I can send you to a guide for.
Did Albert Camus win the Nobel Prize?
Yes, in 1957, at forty-four — at the time the second-youngest laureate in literature after Rudyard Kipling. He died in a car crash a little over two years later, in January 1960. Annie Ernaux won the same prize in 2022 and is the first French woman to have done so.
Do I need to read French to read these authors?
No, all five are available in English. Camus and Saint-Exupéry have been translated many times over, so it is worth checking which translation you are buying; Ernaux's recent English editions are mostly by Alison L. Strayer; and Philippe Petit writes his books in English himself.
Is Philippe Petit a writer or a high-wire artist?
Both, and the writing came out of the wire. He is a French performer who has lived in New York since the 1970s and writes in English, so he sits at the edge of a French literature list. The books themselves are French in temperament: precise, argumentative, and more interested in method than in the feat.
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”
— Albert Camus, Summer (1954)
Every author on this page has a full guide: the complete bibliography, publication order, and an honest answer to which book to open first.
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