Antoine Laurain Books in Order

If you want the classic entry point: The President's Hat → The Red Notebook
If you want romance and Paris atmosphere: The Red Notebook → French Windows → Red Is My Heart
If you like playful time slips: Vintage 1954 → An Astronomer In Love
If you want the darker, twistier side: Smoking Kills → The Readers' Room → The Portrait

Antoine Laurain was born in Paris in 1972, and Paris has stayed at the center of his work ever since. He studied film at university, made short films, and wrote screenplays before novels became his main form. That background shows in his fiction, which often moves with the clean timing of a well-built film scene.

Before he was known as a novelist, he spent years working for an antiques dealer in Paris. The job put him in auction rooms, among collectors, and around objects that seemed to carry whole lives inside them. It also gave him material. Laurain has said that he wrote his first novel while minding the shop and waiting for customers, which feels exactly right for a writer so interested in the secret stories hidden inside ordinary things.

Old objects opened the door to fiction for him.

That first novel, The Portrait, won the Prix Drouot in 2007. It is a compact, odd, funny story about an antiques collector who finds a portrait of a man who looks exactly like him. The premise is pure Laurain, a small shift in reality, one strange object, and suddenly an ordinary life starts sliding in a new direction.

A wider international audience found him through The President's Hat. In that novel, a misplaced hat once worn by François Mitterrand passes from person to person and seems to change each life it touches. The book won the Prix Landerneau Découvertes and the Prix Relay des Voyageurs, and it was later adapted for French television. Readers tend to like Laurain for this mix of charm and mischief, where coincidence can feel almost magical but the emotions stay human.

He kept building on that approach in The Red Notebook, French Rhapsody, and Vintage 1954. A lost handbag becomes the start of a romantic search. A letter that arrives decades late sends a middle-aged doctor back toward the band, and the life, he left behind. A bottle of wine sends a handful of present-day characters into 1954 Paris. Laurain returns again and again to missed chances, delayed messages, second starts, and the idea that a life can turn because of one tiny accident.

Chance is one of his favorite plot engines.

That does not mean the books are all airy. Smoking Kills turns a quitting-smoking story into a black comedy with a nasty edge, and The Readers' Room brings murder and literary games into a Paris publishing house. Even in the darker books, Laurain keeps his touch light. He likes concise stories, clear setups, and characters with recognizable jobs and worries, a doctor, a bookseller, an editor, a collector, who then find themselves in situations just odd enough to push them off balance.

More recent books show that he still likes to change the angle without losing his voice. French Windows begins with a photographer, a therapist, and a murder, then turns into a sly game of looking and being looked at. An Astronomer In Love stretches farther, linking the eighteenth-century astronomer Guillaume le Gentil with a present-day Parisian man, and shows that Laurain can move between history, romance, and whimsy without getting heavy.

He has also worked as a journalist and is known as a collector of antique keys. He still lives in Paris, the city that keeps giving his fiction its streets, apartments, brasseries, and sense that anything interesting might happen if you simply turn the corner at the right moment. That mix of everyday life, wit, and gentle unreality is what keeps readers coming back.