By CLAIRE ALLFREE

THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

(Harvill Secker

£20, 496pp)

THIS marvellous novel is part gripping literary mystery and part disquisition on being a black author in a predominantly white culture — and this Senegalese author knows it’s just as important it should be the former as the latter.

In other words, it’s an unapologetic hymn to the sheer pleasure of reading that hums with literary references and meta-fictional game play.

Our narrator, Diegane, is a Paris-based Senegalese novelist who, after languishing in obscurity for years, becomes the toast of the city following a favourable review.

But amid invitations to appear at festivals, he is mainly concerned with unpicking the enigma behind an all but lost novel, The Labyrinth Of Inhumanity, whose black author, T.C. Elimane, disappeared without a trace during the 1930s after being accused of plagiarism.

As Diegane embarks on his own labyrinthian journey, so the reader is drawn into a skilfully drawn reconstruction of French literary history in which ideas of authenticity, power, race and fame are wittily deconstructed. Terrific.

CHANGE

by Edouard Louis, translator John Lambert (Harvill Secker £18.99, 288pp)

YOU don’t have to have read the French author Edouard Louis’s previous two novels to enjoy his third. Although, as they are all autobiographical, to read them together is to marvel at his seemingly inexhaustible ability to mine every crevice of his personal experience in the name of fiction.

Those first two books testified to the extreme hardship and poverty of France’s disenfranchised white working classes in which he grew up. Now, we find him on the cusp of radical change: studying at a lycee in Amiens and exposed to previously unimaginable new worlds.

There’s his undefinable friendship with Elena, a girl whose privilege and culture seduce him utterly, but there is also Didier, a sexually liberated gay writer. Throughout, Louis strains to shed his old skin in favour of new identities — author, lover, actor, bourgeois — but the process is fraught with shame.

A mesmeric novel that doesn’t so much document change as question the extent to which it’s possible.