Upon awarding the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature to Annie Ernaux, the jury noted that her œuvre ‘examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class’, adding that ‘she with great courage and clinical acuity reveals the agony of the experience of class’.1 In 2018, Nicolas Mathieu won the Goncourt Prize for Leurs enfants après eux, a novel about class differences and youth in the deindustrialization context of North Eastern France. A commentator remarked that ‘Nicolas understands the destitute, the working class, in a way that most writers don’t’.2 Since 2014 and the critically acclaimed En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, Édouard Louis has likewise been committed to shedding light on his childhood in a poverty-stricken village in the North of France and regularly examines how politics affects the lives of working-class individuals, because it is a matter of ‘life or death’.3 In the same vein, Mauritian-French writer Nathacha Appanah's work, including Tropiques de la violence (2016), plunges the reader into the intimacy of its characters while discussing social injustice, marginalization and immigration in a slum in Mayotte; Haitian writer Kettly Mars's Aux frontières de la soif (2013) denounces the precarious post-earthquake living conditions of those living in refugee camps and their experience of poverty, famine or prostitution; Cameroonian writer Djali Amadou Amal's Les Impatientes (2020) examines the feminine condition among the Peuls in Cameroon; and Québécois writer Kevin Lambert's Querelle de Roberval (2018), a queer ‘fiction syndicale’, tells the story of a strike in northern Quebec and explores conflict, desire and domination. All of these writers make contributions to the contemporary social novel genre, as they seek to raise awareness about social issues, injustices and the conditions of the working class and marginalized groups.