Winner of the Prix Goncourt, this dizzying literary page-turner ingeniously blends crime, fantasy, sci-fi, and thriller as it plumbs the mysteries surrounding a Paris-New York flight.
In June 2021, a senseless event upends the lives of hundreds of men and women, all passengers on a flight from Paris to New York. Among them: Blake, a respectable family man, though he works as a contract killer; Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star tired of living a lie; Joanna, a formidable lawyer whose flaws have caught up with her; and Victor Miesel, a critically acclaimed yet commercially unsuccessful writer who suddenly becomes a cult hit.
All of them believed they had double lives. None imagined just how true that was.
A virtuoso novel where logic confronts magic, The Anomaly explores the part of ourselves that eludes us. This witty variation on the doppelgänger theme, which takes us on a journey from Lagos and Mumbai to the White House, proves to be Hervé Le Tellier's most ambitious work yet. "An exquisite, insane surprise. Quite simply astounding." -Le Journal du Dimanche
"The Anomaly is the only book that is nominated for the Goncourt, Renaudot, Médicis, and Décembre prizes. For all the judges who cannot stand one another to come to an agreement is in itself an impossible feat, but it is merited here, for Hervé Le Tellier has written an impossible novel. It's a thriller but also a fantasy. A choral novel, which is also surrealist. An adventure, a page turner, soon to be a bestseller, but also an experimental, highly literary work, a stylistic exercise in the vein of Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec (if you were to replace the building with a Boeing jet)." -Le Figaro Magazine Hervé Le Tellier is a writer, journalist, mathematician, food critic, and teacher. He has been a member of the Oulipo group since 1992 and one of the "papous" of the famous France Culture radio show. His books include A Thousand Pearls (for a Thousand Pennies), Enough About Love, Eléctrico W, and All Happy Families.
Adriana Hunter studied French and Drama at the University of London. She has translated nearly ninety books, including Véronique Olmi's Bakhita and Hervé Le Tellier's Eléctrico W, winner of the French-American Foundation's 2013 Translation Prize in Fiction. She lives in Kent, England.
