Antoine Laurain

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Antoine Laurain is a French novelist, screenwriter, journalist, and director. He started his career directing short films and writing screenplays. He later took a job at an antiques dealer in Paris, where he found inspiration for his first novel, The Portrait (2017). His novels have been translated into over twenty languages.

Author recommends

    The Short Stories Of Guy De Maupassant

    By Guy De Maupassant

    Recommended by: Antoine Laurain
    Publish Date: 1880-1891
    A master of the short story, Maupassant wrote stories that are increadibly varied in theme and styles alike. His portraits of humanity are characterised by a focus on unflinchingly realistic descriptions of material desire as a driving force in the…
  • Swann In Love

    By Marcel Proust

    Recommended by: Antoine Laurain
    Publish Date: 1913
    A narrative section of Swann’s Way, the first volume in Proust’s monumental novel In Search of Lost Time, Swann in Love is essentially self-contained and has for this reason often been published independently as a novella. In it, the narrator…
  • Missing Person

    By Patrick Modiano

    Recommended by: Antoine Laurain
    Publish Date: 1978 Awards: 1978 Prix Goncourt
    Paris, 1965. Guy Roland, a private detective who lost his memory ten years before, sets off to uncover the truth about his past. As he seeks to find out who he is, he gathers clues which will lead him to…
  • Wind, Sand And Stars

    By Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

    Recommended by: Antoine Laurain
    Publish Date: 1939 Awards: 1939 Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française; 1939 National Book Award for Nonfiction
    Drawing from his own experience as a pilot, this memoir recounts de Saint-Exupery’s adventures flying the first mail routes across the Sahara and the Andes for the pioneering airline Latecoere, including his crash in the Libyan desert in 1936.
  • Comic Books

    By Jean-Jacques Sempé

    Recommended by: Antoine Laurain
    Sempé’s cartoons blend humour and poetry in whimsical portraits of countrysides and cityscapes, often seen from a high viewpoint, in which tiny figures move around in their neat moustaches and berets. Quintessentially French, his illustrations are timeless and exquisite.
  • Peanuts

    By Charles M. Schulz

    Recommended by: Antoine Laurain
    Publish Date: 1950-2000
    The Peanuts comic strip, originally titled Li’l Folks, first appeared in 1950, in seven newspapers across the United States. The strips feature a group of precocious small children and Snoopy the beagle, who interact with each other exchanging lines characterised…
  • Wuthering Heights

    By Emily Brontë

    Recommended by: Antoine Laurain & Victoria Hislop
    Publish Date: 1847
    A tale of passion, torment, and revenge, Wuthering Heights is set in the Yorkshire Moors, where a supernatural occurrence will prompt Heathcliff to tell the tragic story of his love for Catherine, her marriage to the well-meaning Edgar, and his…
  • Therapy

    By David Lodge

    Recommended by: Antoine Laurain
    Publish Date: 1995
    Laurence ‘Tubby’ Passmore, a successful sitcom writer, wealthy, married, with a platonic mistress, is suddenly struck by a mid-life crisis, and no amount of cognitive therapy, physiotherapy, aromatherapy, and acupuncture seem to alleviate his angst nor his inexplicable knee pain.…
  • The Uncommon Reader

    By Alan Bennett

    Recommended by: Antoine Laurain
    Publish Date: 2007
    When the Queen fortuitously finds out about the Westminster travelling library’s weekly visits to the palace, she begins withdrawing books, one after another, and her public duties begin to be affected as a result. Her entourage will be forced to…