Longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize.
Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family's farm; his wife, Marion; their daughter, Ida; and their neighbour, Christine, an artist. While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife's fortieth birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet's quiet existence: anonymous, menacing letters, an unfamiliar car rolling up the driveway. And as night falls, strangers stalk the houses, unleashing a nightmarish chain of events.
Told in rhythmic, propulsive prose that weaves seamlessly from one consciousness to the next over the course of a day, Laurent Mauvignier's The Birthday Party is a deft unravelling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves, a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present, written by a major contemporary French writer.
Longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize.
Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family's farm; his wife, Marion; their daughter, Ida; and their neighbour, Christine, an artist. While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife's fortieth birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet's quiet existence: anonymous, menacing letters, an unfamiliar car rolling up the driveway. And as night falls, strangers stalk the houses, unleashing a nightmarish chain of events.
Told in rhythmic, propulsive prose that weaves seamlessly from one consciousness to the next over the course of a day, Laurent Mauvignier's The Birthday Party is a deft unravelling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves, a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present, written by a major contemporary French writer.
Laurent Mauvignier was born in Tours in 1967. He gained a degree in Fine Art from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1991, and published his first novel, Loin d'eux [Far from Them], in 1999. He has since written numerous novels, including In the Crowd (2006), The Wound (2009) and Continuer [Carrying On] (2018), all published by Editions de Minuit, and is the winner of eleven literary prizes, including the Prix Wepler and the Prix Amerigo-Vespucci. He is also a playwright and has written scripts for TV and film. The Birthday Party is his first book with Fitzcarraldo Editions.
'One of France's most talented writers.' - France Today
'It is truly a great book: enthralling, impressive and fascinating
in its literary methods.... I was totally captivated by its
sentences that build up pleasure, terror and anxiety, their long,
slow rhythms that create its dynamic and tension just as much as
the situation itself.' - Jean-Claude Raspiengeas, Le Masque et la
Plume
'What matters, as always in Mauvignier's work, is giving a voice to
the voiceless, the worthless, the unloved, the humiliated, even if
this is done with unprecedented violence. For on this isolated farm
where the drama is played out, the aggressors and the victims are
more alike than we might think. All of them settle their scores
with a destiny that has wronged them.' - Jerome Garcin,
BibliObs
'[I]t is Mauvignier's writing, his undulating sentences, that makes
this novel an exceptional work, and elevates this forgotten France
to the rank of literary subject.' - Sylvie Tanette, Les
Inrockuptibles
'Each of his books produce the same shock; the shock of the
magnificence of his language, which, like a tidal wave, slices its
sentences in the middle of a line, then lets them crash onto the
page; the shock of the force of his characters torn apart by
trauma, dragged into a rush of events beyond their control ... The
Birthday Party is a thriller about the pretences that coat every
life.' - Martine Landrot, Telerama
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