We are a reading room, not a bookshop. Bonnes Nouvelles exists to celebrate the writers of France — Flaubert at his desk in Croisset, Colette in the Burgundy light, Rimbaud fleeing the Ardennes — and to read them with the warmth and attention their work deserves. This is the celebratory register: the canon and the craft, appreciated rather than graded.
The review is organised as a set of rooms. The Writers gathers appreciations of the authors themselves. The Craft turns to writing itself — the sentence, constraint, the marvellous, memory as material. The Bookshelf reaches for the essential works and reads them up close. The Salon is for essays and ideas — the peculiar place of literature in French life. And Discover is a curated way in, for anyone standing at the threshold.
Every writer belongs to a France. We celebrate them where they belong.
01The signature — La Carte Littéraire
At the centre of the review is a literary map of France: the writers pinned to the towns and regions that made them, each opening into an appreciation. It is a way of reading the country as a single, connected literature — Rouen and Aix, Illiers-Combray and Charleville, all part of one shelf. You can wander it from the front page or from The Writers.
02How we write
Our voice is well-read, appreciative and unhurried — a literary companion who loves the work. We write in English, with a French-literary sensibility, keeping the French for the titles and the occasional apt phrase — le mot juste, une belle page. Every author, work, movement and quotation is drawn from real, factual sources.
We keep the review evergreen. We write about French literature as a living, ongoing subject, so you will find no dates stamped on our own writing — only the real years of literary history, which belong to the work itself.
03Kept independent
The review is kept independent by its readers, and by a few houses who love the work — booksellers, binderies, festivals and reading rooms, gathered on The Patrons' Page with our thanks. If you would like to write to us, or to join them, the door is on the Contact page.