Marc Levy

Paris-Dauphine, Logitec France and a Computer-Image Company in California

While still with the Red Cross, Levy began a course in management and computing at Paris-Dauphine University in 1982. In his second year, in 1983, he and two friends started a small computer company, Logitec France, with a student loan. About a year later he went to the United States and, with an engineer friend, set up a company producing computer-generated images. Larousse says he ran two such companies, one in California and one in Colorado, and later opened an image-processing card unit at Sophia Antipolis in France.

The group grew beyond his control. He lost his hold on it and resigned. Larousse dates the resignation to 1990; his profile from the Union des Français de l'Etranger gives 1989. He was 28 or 29 and starting over.

A Finishing-Works Firm That Became an Office-Architecture Practice

Back in Paris, Levy founded a small finishing-works company with two friends, an architect and an engineer. Within a few years it had become one of the first office-architecture practices in France. The French national library's authority record lists him in 1994 as director of the architecture practice Eurythmic and of the fit-out company Cloiselec.

He later described those years without regret. "I'm convinced that I wouldn't be where I am if I hadn't made so many mistakes," he told La Réserve magazine. "I think you build on your failures rather than on your successes."

Et si c'était vrai and the DreamWorks Rights of October 1999

Levy's son was born in 1989. For five years, Levy told L'Etudiant, he made up a story for the boy every night and wrote it down the next day. When the boy turned nine he preferred television, but his father kept writing. In 1998 the story became a manuscript about Arthur, the only man who can see and hear a young woman named Lauren whom no one else notices.

His sister read it and told him to send it to the publisher Robert Laffont. "Eight days later, they called me to say my manuscript would be published," Levy told L'Etudiant. In October 1999, before the book was out, Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks bought the film rights. Et si c'était vrai... appeared in 2000 and, according to Larousse, was the best-selling novel of the year in France.

Just Like Heaven and the Novel-a-Year Pace

The film arrived in 2005 as Just Like Heaven, directed by Mark Waters, produced by Spielberg, and starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo. Larousse reports it opened at number one at the American box office. Levy left the architecture firm and wrote full time, at close to one novel a year.

The sales figures Larousse compiled for the following decade show how steady the pattern was. Où es-tu (2001) was the best-selling paperback in France in 2003. Sept jours pour une éternité (2003) was the year's best-selling novel. Vous revoir (2005), the sequel to his debut, reached 700,000 copies. Mes amis, mes amours (2006) passed 525,000 and was filmed in 2008 by his sister. Toutes ces choses qu'on ne s'est pas dites (2008) sold 730,000 copies in its year. The writer and critic Philippe Besson, quoted by Larousse, counted about 500,000 hardcovers a year and as many again in paperback the following year, against what he called a normal literary bestseller of 30,000 copies.

London, Toronto and the West Village

The success of the first book, and the attention that came with Spielberg's interest, pushed him abroad. "Moving to London was the choice to keep living like everyone else, to keep that freedom, since nobody there had heard of me," he said in an interview with the Union des Français de l'Etranger. In 2007 L'Etudiant described him as living in London with his son.

He is married to Pauline Lévêque, a former Paris Match journalist who writes and illustrates children's books. She has said the family moved from London to New York in 2009, when Levy's elder son finished high school and left for college in San Francisco. A 2012 report in the local paper WestView News placed the family in the West Village and noted that they had also lived in Toronto. Levy has three children: the son born in 1989, now an adult, and two younger children with Lévêque.

What the Books Earn: Capital's 2016 Royalty Ranking

Levy has never published his earnings or the value of his rights, and no estimate of his net worth from a reliable source exists. FamousBio therefore gives no net worth figure. The closest public measure is income. In March 2017 the French business monthly Capital ranked the best-paid authors in France on royalties received in 2016, as reported by Livres Hebdo. Levy came second, behind Guillaume Musso, with an estimated 1.7 million euros.

Capital's method: about 350,000 copies of L'Horizon à l'envers (2016) and 750,000 paperbacks of his earlier titles, from GfK sales data, at a royalty of 15 to 18 percent on hardcovers and about 5 percent on paperbacks. The estimate leaves out advances, foreign rights and film rights, so his actual income that year was higher by an amount no source has stated. Totals of copies sold, as quoted by the outlets that interviewed him, have risen from more than nine million for his first six books in 2007, to 33 million in 49 languages in the UFE profile, to 43 million in La Réserve's later interview.

La librairie des livres interdits and Les évadées

His more recent books sell well but below the peaks of the 2000s. La librairie des livres interdits, published by Robert Laffont in November 2024, had a first print run of 240,000 and sold 177,000 copies, plus 20,000 of a collector edition, according to Livres Hebdo. Its paperback came out in November 2025 with a print run of 196,000 and had sold about 77,000 copies by early January 2026.

His 27th novel, Les évadées, is being published in two parts, the first time Laffont has split one of his stories since Le premier jour and La première nuit in 2009. The first volume came out on September 22, 2026, with a print run of 230,000 and sold about 9,200 copies in its first week, 38 percent fewer than its predecessor. The launch was held at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, whose researchers served as models for the book's heroes. The second volume was scheduled for October 15, 2026, with a print run of 180,000, the day before Levy turned 65.

Sources

• Marc Levy - LAROUSSE
• Notice de personne "Lévy, Marc (1961-....)" | Accueil | Catalogue général | BnF- Bibliothèque nationale de France
• People - Les coulisses des people avec L'Etudiant
• Interview de Marc Levy - UFE
• An Interview with Marc Levy, France’s Widest Read Author - France Today
• Marc Levy - Une fille comme elle - La Réserve Magazine
• Paris Expats Abroad: 10 Questions with Author Pauline Lévêque | Bonjour Paris
• French author Marc Levy contacts WestView News: - WESTVIEW NEWS
• Les cinq auteurs les mieux payés de France - Livres Hebdo
• Les meilleures ventes de livres du 29 décembre 2025 au 4 janvier 2026 : Marc Levy en progression - Livres Hebdo
• « Les évadées » de Marc Levy : le pari du diptyque resserré - Livres Hebdo