Raphaël Confiant’s latest novel — Barbès créole blues (Le Mercure de France, February 2026) — is now available!
Description (from Le Mercure de France): The 1960s. Émilienne and Boris come from Martinique and meet in Paris. But they don’t belong to the same world. Boris studies philosophy at the Sorbonne and hangs out in the Latin Quarter with his petit-bourgeois friends. Émilienne, on the other hand, arrives in France through the Bumidom, the Bureau for the Development of Migration in the Overseas Departments, which brings thousands of Martinicans, Guadeloupeans, and Réunionnais to mainland France to work as mail carriers, nurses, factory workers, and police officers…
Émilienne sees her destiny slipping away: she will never be a nurse. She ends up on a sidewalk on Boulevard Barbès, at the mercy of a horrible West Indian pimp. It is in this seedy neighborhood, which he frequents in secret, that Boris falls in love with the beautiful “Câpresse”: her lips smile, but her eyes express an unspeakable sadness…
Boris and Émilienne recognize one another: they have things to learn from one another and so, they make a pact: she tells him her life story, which he will put into words. Will Boris be able to complete this novel, Roman de l’Égarée [The Story of the Lost Woman], a tale of shattered dreams and exile?
Raphaël Confiant was born in 1951 in Le Lorrain, Martinique. A committed advocate for Creole culture since the 1970s, he participated with Jean Bernabé and Patrick Chamoiseau in the creation of the Créolité Movement [le Mouvement de la créolité]. A renowned writer in both Creole and French, he is currently a lecturer at the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane.
For more information, see https://www.mercuredefrance.fr/barbes-creole-blues/9782715266476 and https://www.amazon.com/Barb%C3%A8s-cr%C3%A9ole-French-Rapha%C3%ABl-Confiant-ebook/dp/B0GL99VMV5/
For more on the writer, see https://raphaelconfiant.com/ and https://ile-en-ile.org/confiant/
Raphaël Confiant’s latest novel — Barbès créole blues (Le Mercure de France, February 2026) — is now available! Description (from Le Mercure de France): The 1960s. Émilienne and Boris come from Martinique and meet in Paris. But they don’t belong to the same world. Boris studies philosophy at the Sorbonne and hangs out in the Latin Quarter
