Upper-intermediate French short stories (B2)

What does B2 French reading look like?

At B2 the French stops feeling adapted. Sentences carry two or three clauses, characters speak in idioms, and the register moves from the café to the notary's office within a page. Some series, such as Les Coulisses de "Cœur et Châteaux", are told in the present to keep the pace up; others stay in the passé simple throughout. Three things you will see in nearly every chapter:

How is B2 different from B1?

Length, first: B2 chapters run from 313 to 489 words, and fewer of their sentences are there just to remind you of what you know. A single paragraph can hold a flashback, a change of point of view and a joke.

The vocabulary also leaves the kitchen. Within the free chapters you read wills and bequests (le testament, léguer, le notaire), auctions and bids (les enchères, l'enchérisseur), police statements (le témoignage, l'inspectrice) and the art trade (un faux, a forgery). These rarely appear at A2, and they recur across several series.

And the humour turns dry. In Les Lettres de la Maison Vasseur, the old love letters behind a village legend turn out to be rather less tragic than everyone believed, and the auctioneer's father puts it like this: Prosper ne s'est jamais noyé, dit-il tranquillement. Il était juste très, très lent. Prosper never drowned; he was just very, very slow. Understatement like that only works if you have followed every word before it.

• Read for who is hiding what. Many B2 chapters turn on a character who knows more than they say. At the end of each paragraph, ask who that is.
• Collect whole expressions. At this level the useful unit is the phrase, such as faire semblant (to pretend) or de plein fouet (head-on), not the single word.
• Reread a hard chapter a day later. It goes much faster the second time, and shows you how much you had guessed right.

Which B2 French story should I read?

• For family secrets: Le Secret de Montclair, in which a will leaves a Burgundy château to a woman the family has never heard of, or Les Secrets de Grand-mère Lucette, a sewing box full of fabric scraps that match old thefts.
• For crime: Les Témoins du Silence, about an elderly witness to a break-in in the Marais whose story keeps changing, or Le Secret de Grand-mère Colette, in which a painting from 1974 surfaces at auction and Colette's granddaughter starts asking who painted it.
• For sci-fi: Les Échos de Lyon, a startup that lets the bereaved text a digital copy of the person they lost, or Le Jardin de Montmartre, in which a community garden spells out a message overnight.
• For romance and comedy: Pain et Chocolat, between a Lyon bakery and the chocolate shop across the street, or Les Coulisses de "Cœur et Châteaux", behind the scenes of a period drama.

Need a step down? The B1 French stories are shorter and more direct. Or see all the French series, A1 to B2.