Les Cobayes

A pharmaceutical testing center. Three human test subjects. Three pills a day for twenty-one days. And at the end, a check for 3,500 euros. Our three guinea pigs begin the test thinking they’re in it for the money. Three weeks later, they leave transformed. Have their dreams come true, or will their lives become living nightmares?

It’s the best day of Trent’s life: he is finally marrying the beautiful Agnes, after so many years! But there, among the crowd of family and friends cheering the newlyweds, a face from his past casts a pall over his happiness. Other signs eventually confirm it: Miss is back. Helen Dorwell – an alluring and mysterious thief and anarchist… and Trent’s former mistress. With her in town, the honeymoon could quickly turn into a nightmare…

Sgt. Trent’s days are spent wandering the vast lands of the great Canadian north, in the company of his faithful dog. While devoted to his job, he can’t keep keep himself from feeling the occasional solitude: he has no family, no friends, just his canine companion. One evening, he thinks back on the time he had a fiancée, and was so close to settling down… A volume full of nostalgia and surprise.

Blacksad is in New Orleans, looking for work. He just so happens to come across a rich Texan who asks him to drive his car back down to his hometown. Perfect! An easy job and good money, not to mention the beautiful car! So the detective accepts. But, much to his dismay, the car is stolen from him in a gas station by Chad Lowell and Abe Greenberg, two beatnik writers wanting to get to Amarillo, Texas. Things soon get messy when Chad shoots at Abe during a quarrel, killing him dead. Forced into exile, Chad finds refuge in a circus. But Blacksad is hot on his trail along those endless highways of southern America.

At the turn of the 20th century, society is in tumult. Anarchist groups have turned from political terrorism to nonviolent revolution, seeking to escape the world’s injustice by returning to nature. Against this backdrop of upheaval, Fortuné Henry travels alone to a remote clearing on the edge of the vast Ardennes Forest, there to found his own colony: L’Essai. Many will join him. Some will leave. Others will stay. In colors by turns muted and vibrant, but always sensitively attuned to the setting and character, Nicolas Debon breathes life into the true story of a short-lived utopia.

Who is Lena? What is she up to? Does she even know her mission? Setting out from an East Berlin neighborhood that is home to former dignitaries, she goes about passing out small, innocent-seeming gifts from Budapest to Transylvania to Kiev. She crosses the Danube delta, the Black Sea, Anatolia, and the Aleppo bazaar. Each time, she crosses borders incognito, claiming to have nothing to declare. A journey at once timeless and inextricable from the great issues of our age, “Lena” combines the intimacy dear to André Juillard and Pierre Christin’s predilection for vast geopolitical canvases.

The race is on through forbidden Eiam territory as Lenny June, his boss the Terran Ambassador, and the galactic cartel assassin Sebshem Antal Nya, all converge on the coveted prize: shards of a deity vanquished in spectacular aerial combat long ago. These fragments, known as the god’s tears, are not only proof of a superior if extinct form of life, but holy artifacts being used in… a mysterious resurrection ritual. Will Lenny June outsmart his wily boss and elude Nya, his fiancée’s murderer, to whom he is now irresistibly chemically attracted?

The world turned upside down in 1929, starting in the United States. As the Great Depression shook the nation, so-called “gods” began to appear along Route 66, and quickly grew in number. With humankind slowly dying out, history then took a different course… This is the story “of gods and men,” set in the year 2047.

Sometimes tragic, always moving. Trivial Quantities talks about the relationship between the artist and his work, the rise of extremism and the connection between people with huge sensitivity and a rare intelligence. Our hero, Marco, carries on along his path. He exhibits his photographs in a fancy Paris gallery; he returns to the shipyards where his father used to work to photograph the workers and his old friends, and he moves in with his charming vet, Emilie. Manu Larcenet never judges, and approaches his interrogations of the human condition with extreme caution. This is just one of those books that stays with you long after you’ve turned the last page.

In the aftermath of his mother’s death, Alexander finds himself sucked into the crazy world of espionage. He is sure of only two things: that his life is in danger and that everyone around him is playing some kind of game. Their game. First and foremost Vanessa, the British secret agent who has recently become Alexander’s lover.