Canongate acquires Rachid Benzine's 'luminous' French novel
Canongate has snapped up French-Moroccan writer Rachid Benzine’s "luminous" novel, The Man Who Read Books, which was originally titled L’homme qui lisait des livres. Sam Taylor – the novelist and translator of Laurent Binet, Leïla Slimani and Marcel Proust – will translate the book into English.
Canongate CEO Jamie Byng acquired world English rights from Delphine Ribouchon at Editions Julliard amid "great international buzz". To date, rights have sold in 16 territories, including Germany (Piper), Italy (Corbaccio), Spain (Salamandra), Netherlands (Atlas Contact), Greece (Psichogios), Norway (Bonnier), Sweden (Bonnier), Portugal (Bertrand), Brazil (Intrinseca) and Romania (Litera).
Since acquiring, Byng has negotiated deals with Reagan Arthur at Cardinal in the US and Dionne Brand and Martha Kanya-Forstner at Alchemy in Canada, the new Knopf Canada imprint, in what the published called "a major North American auction".
Canongate will publish in hardback, e-book and audio in November 2026, and French reader Claire Reiderman will edit.
The novel tells the story of a chance encounter between a young photographer and an elderly bookseller in Gaza. "Over the course of their conversation, the bookseller recounts his life story," the synopsis says. "It is a story of resilience, of beauty, of humanity. The bookseller cannot tell his story without it simultaneously being the history of the Palestinian people: from exile to imprisonment, from activism to political disillusionment, from the joys of life, love, theatre and watching your children grow up and thrive to the tragedies that tear your loved ones from you."
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The blurb adds: "The bookseller, surrounded by the books that marked his life, tells the story of a man who, quietly reading day after day, simply chose not to ‘add to the world’s misfortunes’. In its pages, Rachid Benzine gives us a magnificent modern tale that explores the power of words against barbarism, of book lovers as the last bastions of resistance against the loss of empathy and humanism in our societies."
Benzine said: "Faced with Gaza, we are all confronted by our collective powerlessness. International law is faltering, ideals are crumbling and our anger threatens to drive us apart. This conflict concerns us all deeply. Nabil, my character, allows me to explore this question without resolving it, to keep it alive amidst the clash of certainties. By writing about a bookseller in Gaza, I do not claim to speak for Palestinians, but to create a space where we can all recognise ourselves."
Taylor added: "It was a pleasure and a privilege to translate Rachid’s novel. What I loved about it was the way it focused, even amid the vast sweep of history and the horrifying violence, on the small, intimate things that make life worth living: the taste of coffee, the smell of baking flatbread, the solace of friendship and love. Above all, though, this is a love letter to books."
On acquiring, Byng said: "Rachid Benzine’s The Man Who Read Books is both a beautiful novel about the power of books to console and nourish, as well as the heartbreaking story of Nabil, an elderly Palestinian man who ends his days running a small bookshop in Gaza. In the course of this short, elegantly written tale, which Sam Taylor has translated superbly, we are taken on a deeply affecting journey, one that spans eight decades of displacement and loss."
