Memoir

Gisele Pelicot has spent two years learning to live inside a story the world could scarcely fathom. Now, in a memoir released this week, the 73-year-old French woman who became a galvanizing figure in the fight against sexual violence lays out, in spare and searing detail, how she survived a crime orchestrated within her own home — and why she chose to attach her name and her face to a case that forced France to look hard at itself. In “A Hymn to Life,” Pelicot retraces the 2024 mass-rape trial in which her former husband,…

Nicolas Sarkozy’s three weeks behind bars were marked by “greyness and solitude,” the former French president writes in excerpts from a prison memoir due next month — a personal chronicle that recounts prayer, confinement and the small routines that became a lifeline after his conviction in a Libya-related campaign financing case. The 216-page book, titled "Diary of a Prisoner" and scheduled for release Dec. 10, offers the first extended account of Sarkozy’s time at La Santé prison after his October conviction for allowing…