Laurent Mauvignier wins the Prix Goncourt 2025 for his novel La maison vide (The Empty House). The 58-year-old writer was awarded a prize by the jury of the Académie Goncourt on Tuesday, November 4th.
Adélaïde de Clermont-Tonnerre received the Prix Renaudot 2025 for Je voulais vivreThe book was opposed by Feurat Alani (Le ciel est immense), Anne Berest (Finistère), Justine Lévy (Une drôle de peine) and Louis-Henri de La Rochefoucauld (Modern Love) by.
All four finalists of the Prix Goncourt have already been featured here. Literary return discussed: To Emmanuel Carrère with Kolkhoze, Laurent Mauvignier with La maison vide, Nathacha Appanahs The night in the heart and Caroline Lamarches Le bel obscur, at 2025 pm.

Kai Nonnenmacher, “World in a state of turmoil: Emmanuel Carrère”, Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature, September 3, 2025, https://rentree.de/2025/09/03/welt-im-taumel-emmanuel-carrere/
Emmanuel Carrère's "Kolkhoze" (POL, 2025) is a family and historical epic spanning four generations. It intertwines the author's Russian-Georgian roots with his French identity and places personal destinies within the context of major political upheavals: from Stalinist violence and collaboration in World War II to the war of aggression against Ukraine. Carrère weaves together autobiographical reflection, genealogy, political philosophy, and historiography, elevating the tension between remembering and concealing, the search for truth and myth, private intimacy and historical catastrophe to a literary device.
At the heart of the novel lies the metaphor of the collective farm – historically a symbol of Stalinist forced collectivization, but in the novel also an image for the family as a collective in which truth, identity, and individual freedom are subsumed under collective narratives of origin and history. Thus, the family history, particularly the silence surrounding Carrère's collaborating grandfather, becomes a mirror reflecting the mechanisms of repression and uchronia in totalitarian systems.
The interpretation highlights how Carrère addresses the Soviet practice of historical revisionism and the persistence of such mechanisms in Putin's Russia. The novel directly incorporates the reality of the war in Ukraine and demonstrates that the confrontation with the Soviet past continues today, both militarily and symbolically. Carrère portrays Putin's regime as a "gigantic dystopia" in which propaganda perpetrates a perverse inversion of reality. This also marks a break with his leniency towards his mother, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, who long believed Putin to be brutal but rational: The novel insists on a clear moral stance that names aggression and imperialism for what they are. Finally, the essay emphasizes that "Kolkhoze" transcends the family chronicle and is a book about the fragility of European identity. France is introduced as a counterpoint—a place of official commemoration and integration—while Georgia, through Carrère's cousin Salomé, appears as a hope for self-determination against imperial claims. "Kolkhoze" is a dual exploration: genealogical and political, intimate and historical, a plea for the search for truth and moral clarity in the face of a past marked by myth and violence.
Go to Article: https://rentree.de/2025/09/03/welt-im-taumel-emmanuel-carrere/

Kai Nonnenmacher, “The Unfindable Medal: Laurent Mauvignier”, Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature, September 14, 2025, https://rentree.de/2025/09/14/die-unauffindbare-medaille-laurent-mauvignier/
Laurent Mauvignier's monumental novel "La maison vide" (2025) is his family saga and an archaeology of silence. Its starting point is a chest of drawers full of relics—photographs with cut-out faces, vanished letters, a missing medal. From these gaps, the narrator reconstructs five generations since Napoleonic times, a history marked by wars, shame, myths, and unspoken traumas. This essay demonstrates that Mauvignier understands invention not as a lie, but as the only poetological possibility of saving the past from disappearing. Family myths are dismantled, and repressed stories—especially those of women like Marguerite—are made audible once more. "La maison vide" proves to be a meta-novel, simultaneously an intimate family history, a critical reflection on the politics of memory, a poetological manifesto, and a summa of his own work.
Go to Article: https://rentree.de/2025/09/14/die-unauffindbare-medaille-laurent-mauvignier/

Kai Nonnenmacher, “Partnership and Violence in the Novel: Nathacha Appanah”, Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature, August 29, 2025, https://rentree.de/2025/08/29/partnerschaft-und-gewalt-im-roman-nathacha-appanah/
The title “La nuit au cœur” (2025) of Nathacha Appanah’s new novel reflects its central themes: violence, fear, isolation, trauma, but also resistance and the search for meaning and memory. The novel is structured in five parts, alternating between the author’s personal, autofictional narrative and the reconstructed fates of Emma and Chahinez, with an “imaginary chamber” serving as a space for encounter and reflection. The novel deconstructs femicides not as isolated incidents, but as expressions of a deeply entrenched patriarchal system that transcends cultures and eras. It sharply criticizes patriarchal societies, particularly in Algeria and Mauritius, where women face stigmatization upon divorce and their autonomy is restricted. The parallel narratives of the three women—one survivor and two victims—underscore the universal danger women face and the chilling similarities in perpetrator profiles and patterns of violence (control, jealousy, isolation, physical and psychological abuse).
Go to Article: https://rentree.de/2025/08/29/partnerschaft-und-gewalt-im-roman-nathacha-appanah/

Kai Nonnenmacher, “Invasive Plants and the Third Gender: Caroline Lamarche”, Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature, September 10, 2025, https://rentree.de/2025/09/10/invasive-pflanzen-und-drittes-geschlecht-caroline-lamarche/
Caroline Lamarché's novel *Le bel obscur* (2025) is an exploration of love, memory, and gender identities, in which a narrator, after the breakdown of her marriage, delves into her own identity and genealogical past. The central title, "Le bel obscur," is closely linked to the hidden, queer life of her ancestor Edmond, whose erasure from the family tree represents the suppression of his unsettling in-between position. The novel deconstructs binary gender orders by redefining love as a fluid, invisible bond, with the narrator emphasizing the necessity of the "third party" as opposed to the exclusive duality, even for herself as the wife of a gay man. In its hybrid form of novel, essay, and dream prose, *Le bel obscur* transforms personal suffering into a universal poetic experience that affirms the fragility of human relationships, the invisibility of certain identities, and the creative power of storytelling.
Go to Article: https://rentree.de/2025/09/10/invasive-pflanzen-und-drittes-geschlecht-caroline-lamarche/
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.