An electrifying literary conspiracy thriller from the internationally bestselling author of HHhH.
Laurent Binet lives and works in France. His first novel, HHhH, was an international bestseller which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt du premier roman, among other prizes.
Establishes Laurent Binet as the clear heir to the late Umberto
Eco, writing novels that are both brilliant and playful, dense with
ideas while never losing sight of their need to entertain... One of
the funniest, most riotously inventive and enjoyable novels you’ll
read this year
*Observer*
A hugely entertaining novel, taking delight in its own twists and
turns
*Spectator*
Lively, earthy, experimental, ambitious, clever and endlessly
entertaining… Smart, witty, direct, cool
*The Times Literary Supplement*
The premise is a stroke of genius. Roland Barthes did not die
following an accident in 1980; he was murdered… The strands of the
plot are skilfully interwoven through a dual process of
fictionalisation of the real and realisation of the fictional
*Financial Times*
An almost filmic detective romp, taking in glamorous international
locations, killer dogs, Bulgarian secret agents, several varieties
of sex and wild car chases
*Literary Review*
A smart spoof thriller, cheekily taking as its cat the most famous
Parisian intellectuals in the scene in 1980… It’s all fun and
games, ever so clever, and highly self-congratulatory for those of
us who wasted years studying the abstruse and ultimately worthless
theories of these French thinkers
*i*
Laurent Binet is possessed of something like Superman’s X-ray
vision combined with a million lasers. When he gets something in
his sights, that thing is dead. And what he kills in his new novel
is literary theory, in all its fake unuseful stupidity…. Reading
Binet gives you that rare pleasure of feeling that you’re losing
your grip on reality… What Binet can do with a scene, a paragraph,
is beyond belief… One suspects Binet will make, or perhaps already
has made, a lot of enemies with his jaw-droppingly disrespectful,
extremely witty and – yes – heartfelt book. But one thing’s for
sure, he’ll know how to handle them
*Herald*
Incredibly timely ... very entertaining, like a dirty Midnight in
Paris for the po-mo set
*Guardian*
On one level it’s a nostalgic look at a period in which French
thinkers spent less time brooding on national identity… And on
another it’s an exercise in pure intellectual slapstick of the kind
that French humourists do well… It’s possible that his novel shares
a few shreds of DNA with Zoolander
*London Review of Books*
A playful conspiracy thriller.
*Guardian, 2017 Books of the Year*
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
