This autumn, our literature course will take Laurent Mauvignier’s La Maison vide, winner of the 2025 Prix Goncourt, as its central thread: a sweeping family saga exploring memory, secrets, shame, and a changing France across generations.

Through 15 lively and interactive sessions, we will use the novel as a gateway to much more: French history and society, women’s lives and freedom, family secrets, social background, war and the Occupation, as well as the relationship between literature, memory and truth.

Can we inherit our family’s traumas? Do we have the right to reveal the secrets of the dead? What would we have done during the Occupation? Can fiction express a truth that history cannot? And did La Maison vide really deserve the Prix Goncourt?

This is not simply a course about analysing a book. We will discuss, debate, challenge each other’s opinions and experience literature together, while developing your French at B2/C1 level.

A full semester exploring a novel that is already on its way to becoming a modern classic of French literature.

15 sessions of 75 minutes, teaching and discussions in French. First course 2. September 1.15 pm.

Places are limited, sign up and step inside La Maison vide with us!