The Consolation Match
Publisher
:
Le Dilettante
Parution date
:
2008
EAN
:
9782842631529
Description
Published on March 11 and already sold in 21 languages, La Consolante has 600,000 copies in print in France and is the #1 fiction best-seller there.
UK rights sold to Chatto & Windus.
At his parents’ house one evening Charles finds a letter waiting on the hall table addressed to him, in handwriting he recognizes as that of his long-estranged childhood friend, Alexis. The note contains only three words, telling him that the first love of his life, Alexis’s mother, Anouk, is dead. Charles hadn’t been in touch with either Anouk or her son for years. He’s become a busy and successful architect with commissions at home and abroad who shares his life with a seductive single mother and her daughter, Mathilde, whom he adores. He won’t let himself fall apart over the death of someone he hasn’t seen in such a long time. But he can’t quite shake his grief and anger at the crude way Alexis announced his mother’s death. His preoccupation grows until he decides to give up work and home to find his former friend, try to put the pieces of all of their lives back together, and understand. This journey to the deep heart of his childhood is not a light undertaking. He finds out along the way that Anouk, who was a nurse, committed suicide, and that Alexis, once a drug addict who never appreciated his mother, has buried her in a horrendous cemetery. He also learns that Alexis is now married with children and settled in a comfortable bourgeois life in a small town. He finds his old friend and comes to accept, if not forgive him. But Charles truly finds his way again through Kate, a woman he meets in the same town by chance. She has not had it easy in life and, like Charles, is ready once again to seek happiness.
Author
Anna Gavalda : Anna Gavalda is one of France’s most beloved best-selling novelists. Three previous works of fiction, Je voudrais que quelqu’un m’attende quelque part, Je l’aimais, and Ensemble, c’est tout, were published in the United States by Riverhead under the titles I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere, Someone I Loved, and Hunting and Gathering, and in the United Kingdom by Chatto & Windus. Chatto & Windus is also bringing out her novel, La consolante. Her books sell millions of copies in France and many more in the 40 languages into which they have been translated.
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