Books like Profession du père by Sorj Chalandon

A timeless tale of a prince visiting Earth to learn about adults and human folly.

Victor Hugo’s historical epic follows peasant Jean Valjean, unjustly imprisoned and pursued by the relentless inspector Javert, exploring themes of justice, redemption, and the social conditions of 19th-century France.

Marcus Goldman, a writer and former student of the affluent Goldman family of Baltimore, returns to the United States to confront a decades‑old tragedy that shook his privileged youth and threatens to unravel the family's glittering facade.

"Available in English for the first time, the latest astonishing, bestselling, and award-winning book by Annie Ernaux. The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present -- even projections into the future -- photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective. On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir "written" by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the "I" for the "we" (or "they", or "one") as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents' generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents' generation (and could be writing of her own book): "From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the "we" and impersonal pronouns.""--

Les Faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters) is André Gide’s 1925 novel that explores identity, imitation, and sexuality through intersecting narratives, including a meta‑fictional framing device and a protagonist modeled on Gide himself.

"L'idée de Sam était belle et folle : monter l'Antigone de Jean Anouilh à Beyrouth. Voler deux heures à la guerre, en prélevant dans chaque camp un fils ou une fille pour en faire des acteurs. Puis rassembler ces ennemis sur une scène de fortune, entre cour détruite et jardin saccageé. Samuel était grec. Juif, aussi. Mon frère en quelque sorte. Un jour, il m'a demandé de participer à cette trêve poétique. Il me l'a fait promettre, à moi, petit théâtreux de patronnage. Et je lui ai dit oui. Je suis allé à Beyrouth le 10 février 1982, main tendue à la paix. Avant que la guerre ne m'offre brutalement la sienne..." -- goodreads.com "Sam's idea was beautiful and crazy: mount the Antigone by Jean Anouilh in Beirut. Fly for two hours to the war, finding a son or daughter to become actors, from each side. Then these enemies would be put on a makeshift stage, between a destroyed and ransacked courtyard garden. Samuel was a Greek. Jewish, too. My brother somehow. One day he asked me to participate in this poetic truce. He made me make a promise, to do this with little theater people of patronage. And I said yes. I went to Beirut on February 10, 1982, hand outstretched to peace. Before the war abruptly gives me his..."--cataloger's translation of publisher's website.