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by Laurent Mauvignier
A painter contends with the ghosts of the French countryside in a psychological literary thriller by a major French writer.
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 neighbor, 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 unraveling 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.
"The amount of detail and digression that Mauvignier explores in his slow, finely drawn (and smoothly translated) dissection of these lives is remarkable and goes far to sustaining interest... [in this] quasi-Proustian noir." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Mauvignier spins a mesmerizing psychological horror set in the seemingly humdrum French hamlet of Three Lone Girls... Readers will be riveted." - Publishers Weekly
This information about The Birthday Party was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Laurent Mauvignier was born in Tours in 1967. He is the author of several novels in French and is the winner of four literary prizes, including the Prix Wepler.
Daniel Levin Becker is an American writer, translator and musical critic. He is the youngest member of the Oulipo.
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