In a book club and starting to plan your reads for next year? Check out our 2025 picks.

Summary and Reviews of The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier

The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier

The Anomaly

A Novel

by Hervé Le Tellier
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Paperback:
  • Nov 2021, 400 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About This Book

Book Summary

Winner of the Goncourt Prize and now an international phenomenon, this dizzying, whip-smart novel blends crime, fantasy, sci-fi, and thriller as it plumbs the mysteries surrounding a Paris-New York flight.

Who would we be if we had made different choices? Told that secret, left that relationship, written that book? We all wonder—the passengers of Air France 006 will find out.

In their own way, they were all living double lives when they boarded the plane:

  • Blake, a respectable family man who works as a contract killer.
  • Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star who uses his womanizing image to hide that he's gay.
  • Joanna, a Black American lawyer pressured to play the good old boys' game to succeed with her Big Pharma client.

Victor Miesel, a critically acclaimed yet largely obscure writer suddenly on the precipice of global fame.

About to start their descent to JFK, they hit a shockingly violent patch of turbulence, emerging on the other side to a reality both perfectly familiar and utterly strange. As it charts the fallout of this logic-defying event, The Anomaly takes us on a journey from Lagos and Mumbai to the White House and a top-secret hangar.

In Hervé Le Tellier's most ambitious work yet, high literature follows the lead of a bingeable Netflix series, drawing on the best of genre fiction from "chick lit" to mystery, while also playfully critiquing their hallmarks. An ingenious, timely variation on the doppelgänger theme, it taps into the parts of ourselves that elude us most.

CHAPTER ONE
As Black as the Sky
(MARCH–JUNE 2021)

BLAKE

It's not the killing, that's not the thing. Gotta watch, monitor, think, a lot, and—come the time—carve into the void. That's it. Carve into the void. Find a way to make the universe shrink, to make it shrink till it's condensed into the barrel of the gun or the point of the knife. That's all. Don't ask any questions, don't be driven by anger, choose the protocol, and proceed methodically. Blake can do all that, and he's been doing it so long he can't remember when he started. Once you have it, the rest just falls into place.

Blake builds his life on other people's deaths. No moralizing, please. If anyone wants to talk ethics, he's happy to reply with statistics. Because—and Blake apologizes—when a health minister makes cuts in the budget, culling a scanner here, a doctor there, and an ICU bed somewhere else, that minister knows that he or she's appreciably shortening the lives of thousands of ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

The Anomaly is a fun book, if not a hilarious one; it's playful in its self-referentiality (there's a book within the book, also called The Anomaly) and its engagement with different fiction genres and tropes (political satire, family man who's secretly an assassin). Le Tellier pokes fun at the more risible aspects of contemporary Western society—late night talk shows, Saturday Night Live, action and alien movies, teenage vampire books, political leaders—but also takes them seriously as forces that affect and have a place in people's lives. The political satire comes in the second half of the book; after the Anomaly is revealed, Le Tellier mostly ignores the passengers and turns his focus to the American government's response, featuring a useless, unnamed president. The strength of The Anomaly lies in its science-fictional bent, this striking new world that Le Tellier creates, halfway through, with its myriad philosophical and psychological ramifications...continued

Full Review Members Only (768 words)

(Reviewed by Chloe Pfeiffer).

Media Reviews

Times Literary Supplement (UK)
A striking thought experiment…Le Tellier delivers some sharp social comedy here…But behind the comedy are more profound psychological questions about individual freedom…[The Anomaly] is priceless.

Elle (France)
Fantastic…The Anomaly wears its name well: it's rare in France that a work combines the best of American TV series with an impeccable mastery of the French psychological novel.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Hunter's brilliant translation from the French—her fifth collaboration with Le Tellier—transforms Le Tellier's distinct French voice into a distinct English one. More importantly, Hunter captures the playful exhilaration with which Le Tellier marries his audacious plot to a deep concern for existentialist philosophy...Humorous, captivating, thoughtful—existentialism has never been so thrilling.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
[A]n extraordinary mix of existential thriller and speculative fiction...Questions of philosophy, mathematics, and astrophysics bend this novel far from the typical mold, and Le Tellier's characters must confront the deepest questions of existence. This thought-provoking literary work deserves a wide readership.

Author Blurb Leila Slimani, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Nanny
Buckle your seat belts, as Hervé Le Tellier takes you on an extraordinary ride. You won't want to put this book down until the very last page!

Author Blurb Nicolas Mathieu, Goncourt Prize–winning author of And Their Children After Them
A witty, erudite novel, teeming and minutely detailed, a treat throughout, with—at its center—that head-spinning conceit that will leave you deep in thought for a long time after reading the final page.

Author Blurb Sam J. Miller, Nebula Award-winning author of Blackfish City
A uniquely, gloriously, provocatively French contribution to the sci-fi thriller genre—it will keep you guessing, get your heart pounding, and make you feel and wonder and—above all—think.

Reader Reviews

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



Oulipo

Portrait of Raymond Queneau in green Hervé Le Tellier, the author of the novel The Anomaly, is a member of Oulipo. Oulipo is an international literary group that was founded in 1960 and embraces "formal and procedural constraints to achieve literature's possibilities." The name comes from the French "Ouvroir de littérature potentielle" (OuLiPo), which translates roughly to "workshop of potential literature." By inventing new structures and forms, chiefly by imposing and then working within external constraints, they attempt a "méthodique, systématique" (methodical, systematic) exploration of the potentials of literature. As cofounder Raymond Queneau put it: "Oulipians are rats who build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape."

Contra ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked The Anomaly, try these:

  • Mood Swings jacket

    Mood Swings

    by Frankie Barnet

    Published 2024

    About this book

    In a pre-apocalyptic world not unlike our own, a young Instagram poet starts an affair with a California billionaire who's promised a time machine that will make everything normal again—whatever that means.

  • Dr. No jacket

    Dr. No

    by Percival Everett

    Published 2022

    About this book

    More by this author

    A sly, madcap novel about supervillains and nothing, really, from an American novelist whose star keeps rising.

We have 5 read-alikes for The Anomaly, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket
    Something, Not Nothing
    by Sarah Leavitt
    In 2020, after a lifetime of struggling with increasingly ill health, Sarah Leavitt's partner, ...
  • Book Jacket
    A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens
    by Raul Palma
    Raul Palma's debut novel A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens introduces Hugo Contreras, who came to the ...
  • Book Jacket
    The MANIAC
    by Benjamin Labatut
    The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut is an ambitious work that falls squarely into the category of fiction...
  • Book Jacket: Blood Test
    Blood Test
    by Charles Baxter
    Brock Hobson is a loving single father, a Sunday School teacher, and an upstanding and honest ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Libby Lost and Found
    by Stephanie Booth

    Libby Lost and Found is a book for people who don't know who they are without the books they love.

Who Said...

Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

H I O the G

and be entered to win..