Search results for ""author jean echenoz""

Louis Meyer is an overworked aerospace engineer looking forward to a week-long vacation on the Mediterranean. DeMilo is an astronaut and self-proclaimed ladies’ man whose behavior borders on the obsessive and voyeuristic. When a series of coincidences and disasters-including a devastating earthquake in Marseilles-brings them together on a spacecraft with an aloof woman they are both strongly attracted to, the two men’s flaws and shortcomings emerge as they engage in an underhanded competition to win her over. Brimming with Jean Echenoz’s inimitable humor, We Three is both a satirical take on the adventure novel and subtle experiment with narrative point of view.

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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 theWashington 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 general in his dilapidated office in France’s intelligence agency asking his trusted lieutenant Paul Objat for ideas about a person he wants for a particular job: someone pretty, female, and easily manipulated. Objat has someone in mind: Constance, an attractive, restless, bored woman in a failing marriage to a washed-up pop musician. She is abducted by Objat’s cronies and spirited away into the bowels of France’s intelligence bureaucracy where she is trained for the mission to spearhead the destabilization of Kim Jong-un’s regime in North Korea. Will Constance survive her mission in Pyongyang? Will her feckless husband ever write another pop hit? Joyously strange and unpredictable, full of twists and coincidences, Special Envoy is, in the words of L’Express "a pure gem, a delight at all times, a comedy monument, a celebration of the French language."

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