Number three in book sales in 2022, Mélissa Da Costa placed herself behind formidable competitors, Guillaume Musso and Joël Dicker.
The novelist Mélissa Da Costa, after having reached two million books sold at only 32 years old, takes her readers on a journey to the antipodes, in a novel to be published on Wednesday which could take her very high. The year 2023, that of his sixth book, Women from around the world (Albin Michel editions), will perhaps be his.
Number three in book sales in 2022, according to the GfK institute, Mélissa Da Costa has placed herself behind formidable competitors. Guillaume Musso has remained number one for 12 years. And his following Joël Dicker saw the thriller work very well The Alaska Sanders Affair and the publishing house he started.
However, Musso has announced that he should not release anything new this year. And Dicker apparently prefers publishing in even years. The young woman, for her part, maintains a hell of a train after two novels last year: The Phantom Pains in February, then Lining in September. “I don’t write two novels a year,” she told AFP. Sometimes more, usually less.
“Big readership in prison”
The pocket book edition of “Phantom Pains”, number one in sales when it was released in early February, is guaranteed to be among the successes of the year. Women from around the world has serious assets to also seduce the fans who discovered her with her flagship novel, the first, All the blue of the sky (2019). A beautiful trip to New Zealand, characters that the author takes the time to introduce, and impeccable writing.
“You have to focus on people. As in everyday life: it’s no use 30 or 40 friends,” she considers. “It is in the slowness, in the silences, in the looks, in the gestures, that a lot happens”. Her fans are mostly women, who read more novels.
But “in the letters I receive, private messages, I have 40% men,” says the author. “I also have, as surprising as it may seem, a priori a large readership in prison! Male. I received letters from prisoners, with very heavy sentences, who were shedding their tears”.
Notoriety is still modest, compared to the most media figures in literature. “I was never arrested anywhere, nor recognized anywhere,” she reports.
“Stinging Heroines”
For how long ? Even the tabloids are starting to take a look at her. As Gala who wondered in mid-February: “Husband, child… What do we know about his private life?”
This is banal, according to this young mother from a small town in Yvelines. After a first career in communication, her dream of writing took precedence. And if she earns a very good living today, she who comes from a modest background, leads a very ordinary daily life.
“It’s very silly but you don’t change overnight (…) I still drive in my old gray Twingo and people say to me: but finally!”
In the photos on her Facebook page, smiling every time, the novelist reveals a little of this life which, in appearance, offers few rough edges.
But in Women from around the world as in his other intrigues, all is not rosy. Betrayals, depression, cruelty, unresolved internal conflicts, unmentionable temptations, various excesses and self-deprecation haunt the characters of Mélissa Da Costa.
“I find that in literature women are always very smooth, very consensual. They are always Madonnas, in generosity, self-sacrifice…”, she laments. “I like to have heroines, on the contrary, who sting a little”.