Jean Echenoz

Five Frenchmen go off to war, including two brothers who leave behind Blanche, a woman they both love, who longs to find out whether either one will be coming home to her.

"Czech runner Emil Zátopek, a factory worker who, despite an initial contempt for athletics as a young man, is forced to participate in a footrace and soon develops a curious passion for the physical limits he discovers as a long distance runner. Zátopek's determination and uniquely brutal training regime lead him to break numerous world records, culminating in an unparalleled win of three gold medals at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. Despite being...

Jean Echenoz's sly and playful novels have won critical and popular acclaim in France as well as in the United States, where he has been profiled by the New Yorker and called the "most distinctive voice of his generation" by The Washington Post. With his wonderfully droll and intriguing new work Special Envoy, Echenoz turns his hand to the espionage novel which, when published in France, stormed the bestseller lists. Special Envoy begins with an old...

France's preeminent fiction writer, Jean Echenoz is celebrated for his ability to craft stories with such precision that readers are caught off guard by the intense emotion and imagination just beneath the placid surface of his writing. As Gary Indiana put it in his essay "Conjuror of St. Germain", "Echenoz risks everything in his fiction, gambling on the prodigious blandishments of his voice to lure his readers into a maze of improbabilities and...

"Gerard Fulmard is a loser. A disgraced former flight attendant, he attempts the metier of private detective, with spectacularly disastrous results, then begins working for an obscure political groupuscule beset by an outsized share of infighting and backroom maneuvering. At first employed as an enforcer, Fulmard is then coopted by one of the party's less savory factions, sinking in deeper and deeper until he finds himself the reluctant assassin of...