The figures, delivered by the GfK institute, fell on January 18, 2023: for the 12th consecutive year, Guillaume Musso is the number 1 French writer in sales. Gone are the days – between 2004 and 2011 – when the 48-year-old novelist, a native of Antibes, competed with the equally immensely popular author Marc Lévy for the top step of the podium. With 1.4 million books sold in 2022, Musso is ahead of Joël Dicker who, for his part, sold nearly 1 million copies last year. Defined by some as the antithesis of the last Nobel Prize for literature Annie Ernaux, adored by her readers who praise the romantic and addictive dimension of her plots, despised in the same proportion by her detractors who deplore the poverty of her style and the repetitive of his plots, the writer produces stories with the regularity of a metronome and blithely pursues his path. “I write novels that I would like to read”he declared in 2022 to the Pilgrim. “Entertaining books projecting me out of my daily life.”
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Angelique, his marquise of angels
His latest opus, soberly titled Angelic, thus takes up the ingredients that make it famous: a love story against a backdrop of human drama, a meeting of souls and hearts with a criminal background. When he wakes up in a hospital room, the victim of a heart attack, Mathias Taillefer discovers a young woman at his bedside. The latter, Louise Collange, is a student who voluntarily plays the cello for patients. When she learns that Mathias is a cop, Louise asks him to take over a matter concerning her: the accidental death of her mother, a former star dancer at the Paris Opera, in which she does not believe. This investigation will upset both of their lives… Printed in 400,000 copies, inspired, according to Musso, The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia HighsmithAngelique was a new best-seller.
Children first
Asked this Wednesday, January 18, 2023 on the airwaves of RTLthe prolific novelist, however, revealed a surprising fact: for the first time in eighteen years, he arrives in the month of January of a new year “without having a book being written; without having any current project.” And Guillaume Musso justifies this choice to put his career on hold: “For a very long time, I said that my books were like children. It’s nameless stupidity. I want to be a present father. My children are the most beautiful thing that has happened to me. My great source of joy is to them that I owe it today. I know this won’t last. They are 9 and 5 years old. For me, the worst thing, to have missed my life, would be to tell myself that I didn’t see my children grow up and I don’t want that to happen.“The value of family taking precedence, for the favorite writer of the French, over the value of work… Who said that Guillaume Musso was not a political author?
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