"Joyeux Noël" ("Merry Christmas") by Mary Higgins Clark

"Le chasseur Zéro"("The Hunter Zero") by Pascale Roze
Kamikaze ghosts haunt undeserving winner of France's top prize
"Le chasseur Zéro," the undeserving winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize, is so understated it almost disappears. Afflicted by the infamous minimalist malaise, Pascale Roze's account of an oppressed young Parisian being haunted by the kamikaze pilot who killed her American father in World War II struggles in vain for a tenuous metaphor mingling flight, ghosts, music and repressed grief. If the meaning of the book is somehow raveled up in the heroine's final rejection of the kamikaze's siren call to suicide, it is too subtle by half and slips off my radar without a trace.

"Truismes" ("Truisms") by Marie Darrieussecq
Only in France: An innocent heroine who has lots of sex, turns into a pig and shacks up with a wolfman
Marie Darrieussecq's slim novel "Truismes" is the phenomenon of what the French call the "rentreé," or "the return" — that great heaving into school, work, strikes, political scandals and bomb scares that occurs every September when the bronzed citizenry flock back into the cities after the mass migration to the beaches of Brittany and the Riviera during July and August.

Rejected by all the major publishing houses, the book even starts with a mock warning to potential publishers that the story may land them in prison. The tiny house of P.O.L. took the gamble and so far, the 157-page book has sold 100,000 copies and been translated into 16 languages.

A sort of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" meets the fashion-health-self-improvement-gossip mags, "Truismes" is a tongue-in-cheek send-up of a host of other isms — from eroticism to sexism, commercialism, racism and animal rights-ism. Closer to Terry Southern's "Candy" than Voltaire's "Candide," the nameless heroine is a holy innocent who waltzes through a series of sexual exploits and exploitations. The going gets weird when the perfume saleswoman/massage lady protagonist slips back and forth from pig to human form, weirder still when she sets up housekeeping with a wolfman. Together they ravenously eat their way through the most of the pizza delivery boys in town — pizza for her, delivery boy for him.

"Désolation" by Stephen King

"Le Monde de Sophie" ("The World of Sophie") by Jostein Gaarder

"Les honneurs perdus" ("Lost Honors") by Calixthe Beyala
Crocodile meuniere: A wild post-colonial tale from Cameroon
In "Les Honneurs Perdus," Cameroonian native Calixthe Beyala gives an uproariously Rabelaisian portrait of the African capital she calls Couscousville and its urban counterpart in Paris' Belleville quarter. Couscousville is a steamy ex-colonial stew, where students aspiring to identify with their French cousins shout themselves hoarse regurgitating phrases about "our ancestors the Gauls," where the bordello district maintains a garrison of prostitutes available "at a moderate price," and where Frenchified restaurants cum sex shops serve such mouth-watering delights as crocodile meuniere and singe (monkey) á la provençale. In Couscousville, "we don't encumber ourselves with metaphysics," Beyala's heroine Saïda deadpans.

They are equally unencumbered in Belleville, where a fleshy North African woman in Saïda's language class scoffs at her for being the live-in maid of a dictationist for illiterate foreigners. "You'd be better off in a bordello," she roars with delight.

Underlying the comic turns is a coming-of-age tale in which the African immigrant navigates the deceptions and broken promises of her adopted country, becoming more independent and humane in the process.

Beyala, who was awarded a prize for the novel from the Academie Française, created a minor stir when Assouline and others accused her of plagiarizing six pages from another book, the 1994 "Hunger Road" by Anglo-Nigerian author Ben Okri. The Academy stuck by its choice.

"La Dame d'Abou Simbel" ("The Lady of Abu Simbel") by Christian Jacq
Parisians' perplexing passion for pyramid power
The French have been fascinated with ancient Egypt ever since Napoleon plundered the pharaohs' tombs nearly 200 years ago and hauled off the loot to the Louvre. This is the fourth installment of historical novelist Jacq's sweeping pageant of passion on the Nile, a heavy-handed soap opera starring Ramses, Nefertiti and those villainous Hittites.

"Le Messie" ("The Messiah") by Marek Halter
The book that flushed out an anti-Semitic mayor and convulsed France
At a recent book fair — one of France's largest — in the Mediterranean port city of Toulon, mayor Jean-Marie Le Chevallier, a bumbling member of the far-right National Front, made national and international headline news when he overrode the jury's choice for top prize. Chevallier summarily rejected "Le Messie," citing what he called its "inappropriate" content. (The mayor's alternative to "Le Messie?" That exalted model of "appropriate" content — "Initiales B.B" by Brigitte Bardot.)

Auschwitz survivor Marek Halter's remarkable historical fiction is based on the little-known crusade by a 16th-century Jew to marshall support across Europe for a Jewish state — four centuries before the creation of Israel.

While doing research for another book, Halter came upon accounts of David Reubeni, a Jewish prince from the lost kingdom of Chabor, who arrived in Venice to begin spreading his own gospel of the return of the Jews to a homeland in Palestine. Aided by a woman banker named Benvenida Abravanel, Reubeni scours European courts for support, ultimately pleading his cause to Pope Clement VII, to whom he promises control of the holy sites of Jerusalem in return for the Pontiff's aid.

Although marred by a melodramatic, didactic style, the book redeems itself by the marvelous improbability of its subject and its vivid portrait of 16th-century Europe. "Imagine if Israel had been created four centuries ago," Halter mused to one interviewer. "All history would have been derailed and the destiny of the Jewish people turned on its head."

"Instruments des ténèbres" ("Instruments of Darkness") by Nancy Huston
A Gothic meditation on the daemonic
Nancy Huston is another adoptive Frenchwoman, an Anglophone Canadian writing in French. "Instruments des tenébrès" is a Gothic meditation that intertwines two narratives. In the first, Nada, an embittered novelist sardonically embraces the devil and the demonic when her very own daimon appears to inspire her on the track of the second narrative — the story of Barbe, a young French servant girl who is sentenced to hang in 1712 for killing her child, an infant conceived after her boss' repeated rapes. As the servant girl's tale progresses, Nada is unwillingly drawn into an interior quest of reconciliation, reckoning with a flood of anguished memories of her alcoholic father and oppressed mother. In the end, both she and Barbe are delivered from gloom back into the light.

"Rhapsodie cubaine" ("Cuban Rhapsody") by Eduardo Manet
Schizophrenic life of a pampered Cuban exile
From Havana's villas to Miami's Calle Ocho via Harvard and Disneyworld, Cuban-born Eduardo Manet traces the fortunes of a pampered Cuban exile from 1960 to the present. "Rhapsodie cubaine" is a fictional comic valentine to the schizophrenic exiles split between carving their place in an unfriendly gringo world and agitating for the dream of not-so-sweet revenge on Fidel — imminent for nearly four decades. The trials of this displaced minority serve as a backdrop for what is fundamentally an old-fashioned love story. As the hero, Julian Sargats, loses his father to a nursing home, his mother to a guru, his wife Emma to the chimera of a Cuba free of Castro, he stands heart-broken on the strand of a Florida key. "The day I see Cuba again will be a signal," Julian muses. "My chains will break, Emma, and I will finally be liberated from you."

"Les deux fins d'Orimita Karabegovic" ("The Two Endings of Orimita Karabegovic") by Janine Matillon
Janine Matillon, a French novelist who teaches in Zagreb, recounts the harrowing experiences of a young Muslim intellectual held for an experiment in insemination by her Bosnian Serb captors. "You will be the mothers of our sons to come," declares the professorial head of the project in "Les Deux Fins d'Orimita Karabegovic." "Our blood mixed with yours will purify you." Consoling herself with remembered passages from the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, Orimita finally escapes home to Zagreb, only to find her apartment expropriated by Croatian refugees. The student in French poetry becomes a sniper herself, picking off a Bosnian Serb patrol before fleeing at last to Paris. Etching her images with chilling understatement, Matillon's novel succeeds masterfully in weighing the devastating psychological costs of the war in Bosnia.

"Entre Nous" ("Between Us") by Alain Juppé

"Initiales B.B." ("Initials B.B.") by Brigitte Bardot
In this transparently disingenuous autobiography, the fabled star of "And God Created Woman" and, in post-sex-kitten mode, the animal-rights activist, claims her fair share of victimhood — and manages to get even with just about every one of the vast cast of characters who, she sweetly insists, manipulated her.

"L'Horreur économique" ("The Economic Horror") by Viviane Forrester
Bashing Anglo-Saxon capitalists
Viviane Forrester's alarmist "L'Horreur Economique" is a relentless, self-righteous harangue about the crisis in unemployment and the vicious threat of unrestrained capitalism, replete with murky allusions to the Anglo-Saxon economic demon. Why it is such a hit and what specific steps the author proposes to solve these seemingly insoluble predicaments remains a puzzle.

"Cosima la sublime" ("Cosima the sublime") by Françoise Giroud

"Ma vocation, don et mystère" ("My vocation, gift and mystery") by Pope John Paul II

"Nicholas II" by Hélène Carrère d'Encausse

"La Plus Belle Histoire du Monde" ("The Most Beautiful History of the World") by Hubert Reeves, Joël de Rosnay and Yves Coppens

"Le Défi de l'argent" ("The Challenge of Money") by George Soros

Signé Malraux" ("Signed, Malraux") by Jean-François Lyotard
An intellectual pin-up boy's revenge on his wife's infidelity
André Malraux, the original proponent of the auteur engagé (or writer as man of action), author of "Man's Fate," weighty tomes on art and aesthetics and former minister of culture under DeGaulle, remains the preferred intellectual pin-up here. In November, 20 years after his death in 1976, his ashes were transferred amid official pomp and fanfare to the Panthéon to rest alongside those of Victor Hugo, Emile Zola and other great authors, statesmen and scientists. A slew of biographies and deluxe editions of Malraux's works were issued to mark the occasion: Jean-François Lyotard's "Signé Malraux," the most controversial of the lot, has leapt onto the bestseller lists.

The 72-year-old Lyotard, a former monk who has taught in France, the U.S. and elsewhere, is one of the founders of postmodern philosophy, held in the same esteem here as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. His psychohistorical biography asserts that Malraux, who grew up fatherless, was smothered with affection and gloom from the mother, grandmother and maiden aunt who raised him. To escape this "promiscuity of skirts" and his own horror of being trapped like a daughter among women, the boy buried himself in books, "reading the way others fight," preparing for a life constantly on the the run.

Modesty was never Malraux's strong suit. Reading aloud a just-completed section from "La Condition Humaine" ("Man's Fate") to his wife Clara, the author vaunted the passage as "the most beautiful pages about love written in these last years for a woman." She was enraged: The scene was based on a past infidelity of hers, using Clara's very words to implore her husband's forgiveness.

"Raspoutine" ("Rasputin") by Henri Troyat

"Impromptus" by André Comte-Sponville

"Les Français vus par eux-memês: le XVIIIème siècle" ("The French viewed by themselves: The 18th Century") by Arnaud de Maurepas and Florent Brayard.
My dinner with Louis XV: the royal grope
"The French viewed by themselves: The 18th Century" is an enormously popular compendium of observations about everything under the sun during one of France's most glorious centuries. The authors, the late Arnaud de Maurepas and Florent Brayard, draw on well-known memoirs by Rousseau, Voltaire and Saint-Simon and have dug up obscure recollections by servants to Marie-Antoinette and the police commissioner of Narbonne, among a multitude of other observers. In his take on "My dinner with Louis," the Duke of Croÿ details a soirée with Louis XV and the king's amorous solicitude for Madame de Pompadour, his mistress.

Random cullings from this 1400-page tome yield anecdotes and observations that underscore how vital the 18th century was by comparison to its poor relation — France today.

"Stefan Zweig: le voyageur et ses mondes" ("Stefan Zweig: The traveler and his Worlds") by Serge Niémetz
The tumultuous life of the ultimate cosmopolitan who killed himself in Brazil
For no apparent reason, there is a Stefan Zweig boom underway in France, with two voluminous biographies recently published and reissues of the Austrian author's novels and essays. Best known for "The World of Yesterday," his incisive memoir of Europe before World War II, Zweig remains far more popular in France than anywhere else — even his native Austria. For the French, he epitomizes the ultimate European cosmopolite. His double suicide in 1942 with his much-younger wife in Brazil only accentuates the romance. The tolerant Europe Zweig loved had been crushed under the tanks of the Blitzkrieg and the 60-year-old author despaired of having the strength to rebuild it.

Serge Niémetz's "Stefan Zweig: Le voyageur and ses mondes" presents the man in all his conflicting facets: "upstart and pariah, generous and odious, fundamentally apolitical, but required to engage himself" in historic turmoils. The son of a wealthy Jewish industrialist, Zweig viewed his native Vienna as "a promised land of assimilation" for the Jewish bourgeoisie. An obsessive traveler, he managed to stay long enough in his villa in Salzburg to play host to virtually the whole of European intellectual society. A committed pacifist, he offended the Jewish establishment in the early 1930s by refusing to take a public stand against the emergence of Nazism, fearful of retaliation against Jews. Niemetz's biography offers a brilliant analysis, not merely of an author who deserves far wider recognition, but of the tumultuous epoch that formed him.

"Le Vieil Homme et La Mort" ("The Old Man and Death") by Franz-Olivier Giesbert
The sphinx that was Mitterand
The late president François Mitterand fancied himself as an author-politician and was fond of quoting James Joyce and Voltaire. In Franz-Olivier Giesbert's bittersweet recollections of encounters with the sphinx that was Mitterand, the editor of the daily newspaper "Le Figaro" portrays a paradoxical figure who could disarm you with his erudition and charm one minute and become prickly and mean-spirited the next. "Mitterand was better and worse than we believed," the journalist reflects in "Le Vieil Homme and La Mort." In this moving account, the author ultimately forgives the old man's testiness, justifying it as the president's feisty response to the cancer that stalked him for more than a decade. What emerges is not merely the political animal who hid his disease — along with his mistress and illegitmate daughter — from the French public, but the questioning agnostic facing his own mortality.