French readers have a whole culture of talking about books online, with weekly hashtags for sharing what you're reading and book bloggers who post long, opinionated reviews. English-language readers tend to meet French literature only through a couple of school classics. That's a pity, because the range is huge: adventure serials, short philosophical novels, memoir that reads like a novel, crime fiction, comics. This page is a starting route. All the books below are easy to find in English translation, and we've marked the ones that work well if you want to try reading in French.
Start with a story: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1844–1846)
Edmond Dantès is wrongly imprisoned on the day of his engagement, escapes after years in the Château d'If, finds a fortune and spends the rest of the book taking revenge, very slowly and very cleverly. It first came out in instalments, and it still reads like the best kind of serial: every chapter ends with a reason to read the next. It's long, but it's the easiest long French classic there is. Get a complete, modern translation, since some older English versions were cut.
The novel that changed novels: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857)
Emma Bovary, married to a dull country doctor in Normandy, has read too many romantic novels and wants a life that matches them. She takes lovers, runs up debts, and things end badly. Flaubert worked over every sentence for years, and the book was prosecuted for offending public morals when it appeared (he was acquitted). Lydia Davis's 2010 translation is a good modern choice.
Short and sharp: The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
Meursault, a clerk in French Algeria, goes to his mother's funeral without crying, kills a man on a beach, and is put on trial as much for his indifference as for the killing. It's barely more than a hundred pages, the sentences are short and plain, and people have argued about what it means ever since. Camus won the Nobel Prize in 1957. If you want to try reading a novel in French for the first time, this is a classic choice, because the vocabulary is simple and the tone is flat on purpose.
Written at eighteen: Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (1954)
Seventeen-year-old Cécile spends a summer on the Riviera with her charming, careless father, until a woman arrives who might actually make him settle down. Cécile decides to stop it. Sagan was eighteen when the book came out and it made her famous overnight. It's short, cool and a bit cruel, and it's another good one to read in French.
A life and a century at once: The Years by Annie Ernaux (2008)
Ernaux tells the story of her own life from the 1940s to the 2000s, but in the voice of a whole generation, through photographs, songs, adverts, family meals and politics. It sounds abstract. It isn't. The English translation by Alison L. Strayer was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, and Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022. If you like it, her short books, such as A Man's Place and Happening, are the next step.
Francophone, not just French
French literature isn't only from France. Leïla Slimani's Lullaby (2016), which opens with a nanny's crime in a Paris apartment and then goes back to explain how it happened, won the Prix Goncourt, France's best-known literary prize. Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter (1979) is a short novel written as a letter from a Senegalese widow to her oldest friend, and it is one of the most widely read books from West Africa. From Belgium came Georges Simenon, who wrote dozens of Inspector Maigret novels starting in the early 1930s; Pietr the Latvian is the first, and they're short, atmospheric and ideal for reading in French because Simenon deliberately kept his vocabulary small.
Comics count: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
The bande dessinée, or BD, is a serious form in France and Belgium, with its own festivals and prizes. Persepolis, Satrapi's black-and-white memoir of growing up in Iran during and after the 1979 revolution, was written in French and published in volumes in the early 2000s. It's a good bridge book for readers who mostly read prose. If you want something lighter, Astérix by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, first published in 1959, is packed with wordplay that rewards reading in the original.
Reading in French: a few practical tips
- Start with short books written in plain language: Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, L'Étranger by Camus, Bonjour Tristesse, or any Maigret.
- Read the English translation first if you like. Knowing the plot lets you focus on the language.
- Don't look up every word. If you understand the sentence, keep going.
- French novels use the passé simple, a past tense people rarely use in speech. Learn to recognize it and many classics get easier.
- Join in when French readers share their week's reading online. Posting a few lines about your book, even in imperfect French, is a good way to get recommendations.
If you only read one
Pick The Stranger if you have one evening, The Count of Monte Cristo if you have a month, and The Years if you want to understand what French writers are doing now. Then tell us on Book Twitter which one you chose and whether you'd recommend it.