Last August, London’s Observer Sunday newspaper published a list of “21 writers for the 21st century,” young prodigies set to mark the new millennium. Three of them live in Paris, but only two, Jean Echenoz and Jean-Paul Kaufmann, are French. The odd woman out is Julia Leigh, who moved here from Australia in June.
Barely 30, Leigh’s reputation rests on one slim and original novel, “The Hunter” (Faber & Faber), just out in French as “Le Chasseur” (Actes Sud). It’s a kind of metaphysical thriller, the story of a cold-hearted mercenary, only known as M, who has been sent to the dark forests of Tasmania to track down and kill the region’s last surviving tiger, a legendary beast last seen in the 1930s. M spends weeks on end in the high plateaus stalking his prey, setting traps and smearing himself with wallaby dung to hide his smell. On his rare forays back to civilization, he starts getting involved with a local woman, Lucy, and her wild children. But affairs of the heart cannot keep him from his true mission: the kill.
“The Hunter” is beautifully written, with a well-paced narrative that all comes together in the climax. Like its repulsive but fascinating narrator, the prose is cool and precise. M remembers, for instance, that the tiger is extinct because of “a two-legged fearsome little pygmy, the human hunter: a testimony to cunning, to mind over matter. This thought brings M the kind of satisfaction another man might derive from leafing through a set of family photo albums. He is doing what his ancestors have always done, and done well.”
Leigh is fascinated by our romanticized view of the natural world, now that we have virtually annihilated it. She grew up in the city, but played in the bush all the time. “That is a striking difference between Sydney and Paris,” she says. And the wilderness in Tasmania is practically virgin: “It is a phenomenal experience to go walking for ten days and not have any chance of seeing anybody... Survival is truly at stake.”
This is a dark subject, and an odd choice for a beautiful young woman with a law degree. But she has no time for what she calls “all those I’m 30 and not in love novels.” And she is aware that she is taking an established genre — “the hunting adventure story, the Hemingwayesque thing” — and playing with it, holding it up to the light. Her hero is not exactly a role model, and when it comes to human matters — his relationship with Lucy and her children — he is a sad failure.
So is her book an anti-hunting tract? “No” she replies. “But I think it’s quite an ethical book... As far as people hunting for sport goes, I feel like saying ‘What’s wrong with tennis?’”

“Out Of Place” by Edward Saïd (Granta) & “On Identity” by Amin Maalouf (Harvill)
Like Salman Rushdie and a million more besides, Edward Saïd has no home. He was born Palestinian in Jerusalem, but is Christian, and only spent a handful of years there. In Egypt, where he lived until age 17, he was an “Arab” in a string of British and American schools. In the US, where he now teaches literature, he has become the Palestinian’s most eloquent defender.
Enough politics. Saïd is a great cultural critic, author of the classics “Orientalism” and “Culture and Imperialism.” But “Out of Place” is something else, an autobiography prompted by a long illness. Its subject is his intense bond with his parents, and how they took a clever, insecure boy and turned him into a tortured character called “Edward.” His mother, beautiful but negligent, was always there but forever out of reach. His father, a stationary magnate, managed his errant son like a difficult client. He was their favorite and shame, forever trying to please and failing.
Saïd is an intellectual, and every now and then he forgets his audience and blurts out a word like “lapidary.” But this is rare: 99 percent of the time he is a vivid and precise storyteller. There are many magical descriptions, like his discovery of theater, via a student production of Alice in Wonderland.
“Out of Place” is a dive into memory and childhood. But it is also a hymn to places long gone, recent worlds that have disappeared for ever — multicultural Cairo before the drab Nasser years, Palestine under the British, Lebanon at peace by the sea. I doubt that you will read many better or more honest autobiographies, especially if you feel a little “out of place” yourself.
“On Identity” is oddly complementary. Maalouf, one of the Arab world’s most important novelists and historians, is also a Middle Eastern Christian, brought up in Lebanon. For complicated family reasons he was sent to a French school and ended up in Paris, his home for the last 16 years. So is he Lebanese or French? Both, and neither. He thinks it’s a pointless question, and answers that he is also male, a lapsed Catholic, a Gemini and a lover of white chocolate... In this passionate piece of journalism, published in French three years ago as “Les identités meurtrières” (Grasset), he argues that identity is a complex and shifty business, and anyone who defines himself by nothing more than their country or religion is both stupid and dangerous.
Maalouf’s latest novel in French is “Le périple de Baldasare” (Grasset), just out; in-English readers should try “The Rock of Tanios,” which won the Prix Goncourt in 1993, or the more recent “Ports of Call” (Harvill).

To coincide with Le Mois de la Photo, here is a selection of the best new photography books.
“Think of England” by Martin Parr (Phaidon) & “France” by Thierry des Ouches (Collectionneur)
Two important young photographers publish portraits of their home countries. Parr uses lurid, saturated color and unusual close-ups, zooming in on a priest’s collar, a hairy tattooed belly, or a tacky toilet decoration. He’s in-your-face, and very funny. This is Little England, all tea cosies, tabloids, and sunburnt secretaries on the beach. Des Ouches is more classical, and works in familiar black and white; his photographic Tour de France is a worthy update to the humanistic tradition of Cartier-Bresson and Doisneau.

“Afghanistan” by Chris Steele-Perkins
A British Magnum photographer, Steele-Perkins visited Afghanistan several times over the last five years. He brought back some amazing images of life among the rubble and despair, of an ancient and noble people being torn apart by a pointless, never-ending civil war. Only the weapons — missiles being carried by boy soldiers — hint that this is the 20th century.

“Sous le Ciel de Paris” by Louis Stettner & “Paris Romance” (both Parigramme)
These are the first releases in a new series of classical photos of Paris. Stettner left Brooklyn for Paris in 1947, never to leave; here are 80 of his best pictures of street life, almost all from the early 1950s. “Paris Romance” brings together all the most famous shots of lovers, by Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, and co. No surprises, but isn't this why you moved here?

“Boulangerie!” by Jack Armstrong & Delores Wilson (Ten Speed Press)
This “Pocket Guide to Paris’ Famous Bakeries” gives the rundown on 220 of the city’s best bread-makers, arrondissement by arrondissement. They got it right for my part of the 14th, and I learned that my favorite source of baguettes is also famed for its macaroons. The authors don’t live here, but they must have put on a few pounds doing the research: no tarte has gone untasted.
“Super-Cannes” by J.G. Ballard (Flamingo), “1984” for the dot.com age, an air-conditioned nightmare set in a futuristic business park on the French Riviera, by the man The Guardian called “the Dr Moreau of British fiction.”
“Artisans and Guilds of France” by François Icher (Abrams), a richly illustrated account of the stonecutters, plasterers, woodworkers, and other skilled artisans who built France’s great cathedrals, châteaux