Publisher: Viking, 2007
Translated by Nancy Huston from L’esprit de l’athéisme, Albin Michel, 2006

Can we do without religion? Can we have ethics without God? Is there such thing as “atheist spirituality”? In this powerful book, the internationally bestselling author André Comte-Sponville presents a philosophical exploration of atheism. Comte-Sponville offers rigorous, reasoned arguments that take both Eastern and Western philosophical traditions into account, and through his clear, concise, and often humorous prose, he offers a convincing treatise on a new form of spiritual life.

Publisher: The New Press, 2007, with a preface by Adam Gopnick
Translated by Linda Coverdale from Ravel, Editions de Minuit, 2006

A bestseller in France, Ravel is a beguiling and original evocation of the last ten years in the life of a musical genius, written by the acclaimed novelist Jean Echenoz, winner of the Prix Goncourt. The book opens in 1927 as Maurice Ravel—dandy, eccentric, and curmudgeon—voyages across the Atlantic aboard the luxurious ocean liner the France to begin his triumphant grand tour across the United States, where he will travel aboard such fabled trains as the Zephyr, the Hiawatha, and the Sunset Limited, smoking his precious stash of Gauloises along the way.

Rarely has the difficult craft of storytelling been as well mastered.
— The Times Literary Supplement

The most distinctive voice of his generation and the master magician of the contemporary French novel.
— The Washington Post

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2008
Translated by Catherine Temerson from Origines, Grasset, 2004

Origins recounts the family history of the generation of Maalouf’s paternal grandfather, Boutros Maalouf. Maalouf sets out to discover the truth about why Boutros, a poet and educator in Lebanon, traveled across the globe to rescue his younger brother, Gabrayel, who had settled in Havana. What follows is the gripping excavation of a family’s hidden past. Origins is at once a gripping family chronicle and a timely consideration of Lebanese culture and politics.

"Maalouf's novels re-create the thrill of childhood reading, that primitive mixture of learning about something unknown or unimagined."
— Claire Messud, The Guardian

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, spring 2010
Translated by Tamsin Black from L’intérieur de la nuit, Plon, 2005

Publisher: MacAdam/Cage Publishing, 2007, with a preface by Siri Hustvedt
Translated by Adriana Hunter from Déloger l’animal, Actes Sud, 2005

Fifteen-year-old Rose is trying to make sense of her world. Her mother a beautiful woman with signature stiletto heels, bright clothes, and the synthetic gleam of a blond wig has vanished, and Rose is convinced that she must be in danger. Unable to cope with the possibility of having been abandoned, Rose uses her vivid imagination to construct her own explanation for her mother s sudden disappearance.

“I wanted to tell stories but I was after a style, after boldness, spirit, enhancement, and embroidering...I wanted things to have neither substance nor form but rather the two linked together and inseparable. I wanted malleable sentences and movement. I didn’t want to let go of form and at the same time I wanted to construct a powerful plot, give each of the characters depth, breathing mysterious and unshakable life into them.”
— Véronique Ovaldé in To My American Readers

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, spring 2009
Translated by David and Nicole Ball from Aux Etats-Unis d’Afrique, J-C Lattès, 2005

Publisher: Markus Wiener, May 2008
Translated by George A. Holoch Jr from Les islamistes marocains, Editions La Découverte, 2005