Bibliography of the author
Trois sauvages (2026)
Synopsis
Three characters grappling with the different spheres of the contemporary world.
Louise, who moves in the world of American academia and publishing, her brother Thomas in business, and their friend Joseph in fashion, have shared a passionate bond since childhood. It is a communion rich in promise and in secrets, which they sometimes call a "pact of innocence".
For a long time the trio's life has the feel of a fairy tale, a string of enchanted adventures, but it then comes into acute conflict with the world they move through, the world of today. Louise, independent and rebellious, is cast out of academia and publishing; Joseph is accused of crimes; Thomas, humiliated, wages the fight of his life to defend them. Is their innocence a deception?
Mad love is a second homeland, but it is subversive, marked by solitude and death. This story nonetheless grants it a fragile victory.
Publication details :
- Publisher : Le Cherche Midi
- Publication date : November 12, 2026
- ISBN : 978-2-7491-8503-3
- Format : Paperback, large format
Défoncer la cage (2016)
Synopsis
The cage takes many forms: prison, madness, mockery, the anaesthesia imposed by technological objects and procedures of control. Against this enemy stand the bird, life's epiphanies, a reverie steeped in "luxe, calme et volupté" (Baudelaire's "luxury, calm and pleasure"), though that reverie is bound up with its apparent opposite: frantic desire, whose violence may make it possible to smash the cage. Défoncer la cage forms a diptych with Échapper aux tueurs (2011), both of them books of fiction and free-form pieces which, for Matthieu de Boisséson, run alongside his work as a novelist or are necessary to it.
Press reviews
- "[He] chooses not to choose, since everything, absolutely everything, is an epiphany for him; everything is poetry for him. Matthieu de Boisséson is that secret one would like to keep to oneself, out of the selfishness of the happy few, and would like to give away for the joy of having been able, primus inter pares, to sing of his advent." — Olivier Mony, Sud Ouest, 8 May 2016 (translated from the French)
Publication details :
- Publisher : Gallimard
- Publication date : April 2016
- ISBN : 978-2-07-017921-3
- Format : Paperback, large format
Échapper aux tueurs (2011)
Synopsis
This is a miscellany: short stories, poems, essays.
The killers: the mortal enemy that prowls through a world dulled or petrified by technology. Against this enemy stand lightness, reverie, the mountains, the feeling of being elsewhere, friendship, and everything that allows him what Kafka, in his diaries, called "a leap out of murderers' row".
Press reviews
- "Matthieu de Boisséson's writing is poetic resistance to the brutality or the dullness of the world." — Frédéric Beigbeder, Dictionnaire amoureux des écrivains français d'aujourd'hui, Plon, 2023 (translated from the French)
Publication details :
- Publisher : Gallimard
- Publication date : November 2011
- ISBN : 978-2-07-013533-2
- Format : Paperback
Le Grand Chariot (2002)
Synopsis
Two teenagers, Thomas and his sister Louise, are living out one last summer in Oursière before leaving behind a doomed peasant world. Lightness and heartbreak: it is in the light that love is born, amid swimming, surfing and fervent conversation. Into this are mixed violence, the charm of thugs and that of ambiguous protectors. In an atmosphere of fairy-tale illusion, the dénouement of childhood is cruel, and the novel is the answer, "as sunlit as possible", to a question posed by Thomas: "Why, Louise, will we always be alone?"
Press reviews
- "In command of a sumptuous language, Matthieu de Boisséson unfolds his novelistic canvas with ironic delight, combining a romantic classicism with a Nabokovian freedom of tone... These days of happiness and exhilaration are depicted with rare talent, lyricism and mischief... Idylls marked by a 'light-footed' bliss, which embed the author's fascination with stellar friendships, those that bind two people in mutual protection, a devotion he had already explored in his first novel." — Jean-Luc Douin, Le Monde, March 2002 (translated from the French)
- "A decisive way of binding violence and subtlety together." — Annie Le Brun, La Quinzaine Littéraire, 2002 (translated from the French)
Publication details :
- Publisher : Gallimard
- Publication date : February 2002
- ISBN : 978-2-07-076468-6
- Format : Paperback / E-book / Pocket paperback
Une amitié stellaire (1989)
Synopsis
The 1980s. Santiago and Andres, two men of Basque origin who fought for the Spanish Republic, have been living in the United States for thirty years. They have done their best to forget their past, and Spain. Both are attached to Sarah, a young American woman.
An Englishman, Bentham, who once helped them escape from the Gurs internment camp in France, now turns to them for help. The protector of another tribe of exiles, the Lorins, Bentham asks them to trace a young woman, Araceli Lorin, who has mysteriously disappeared.
Santiago, Andres and Sarah set out on a search that will lead them to Spain and to the legendary past of the Basque Country. The adventure to which Santiago and his friends lend themselves may allow them to reconcile past and future, and to reconnect with a land that had become no more than the stuff of dreams. The closing scene of this first novel by Matthieu de Boisséson reveals the true nature of the bond between his characters, which one of them calls a "stellar friendship": the star friendship Nietzsche described as a meeting of stars in the sky, a mutual protection sometimes mingled with hostility.
This novel is a first exploration of the themes the author would return to in several of his later books: friendship, violence, and a life divided between two continents.
Publication details :
- Publisher : Denoël
- Publication date : September 1989
- ISBN : 978-2-207-23618-5
- Format : Paperback