Second Best

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a playful blend of fact and fiction’ The Telegraph ‘Foenkinos’s surreal yet relatable novel, a French bestseller, considers life in our age of anxiety, when other people’s picture-perfect lives make our own seem drab in comparison’ Washington Post, 10 Noteworthy Books for September ‘It’s about time British readers discovered the wit and originality of David Foenkinos, and this exquisitely bittersweet comedy of life’s missed opportunities is the perfect place to start’ Jonathan Coe, author of Bournville ‘It doesn’t get more captivating than this’ Elle ‘Funny and melancholy, cruel and dramatic’ Le Figaro Littéraire ‘David Foenkinos turns a genius idea into an absorbing novel’ La Croix ‘A sensitive and kind meditation on coming back from failure’ Le Parisien ‘A lively, sharp, playful tale’ L’Obs ‘Peppered with empathy, emotion and humour’ rtbf. Foenkinos’s smash-hit Second Best is a playful, poignant story about fate, loss and how the lives we wish we’d led might not be all they’re cracked up to be . Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin.

Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. Haunted by an overwhelming sense of having ruined his life, Martin withdraws from the cruel Harry Potter-saturated world, only to find it invading his most intimate moments.

com Praise for David Foenkinos: ‘Light, funny and erudite: a delight’ The Guardian ‘Charming, clever’ The Independent ‘A completely delightful jeu d’esprit’ Daily Mail ‘Unputdownable . be ‘An inventive novel about rebuilding after failure, no matter how powerful or vast it may be’ actualitte. Stumbling from therapists and psychological hospitals to remarkable success as a student and a Louvre attendant, Martin grows up blinded by the life he isn’t living. Foenkinos’s] sensitive and empathetic handling of the theme of the also-ran is as instructive as it is entertaining’ Irish Times ‘A brilliant concept for a novel’ Sunday Times ‘Foenkinos has had a gem of an idea . It also shows, more generally, what happens when a society is subject to the endless Instagram audition, the tyranny of the sight of other people’s happiness .

These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Foenkinos’ smash-hit Second Best is a playful, poignant story about fate, loss and how the lives we wish we’d led might not be all they’re cracked up to be .Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). Every line has something profound to say about love and loss, hope and fear, time and memory, and the enduring power of art' Andrew Michael Hurley, author of The Loney.

A genealogy of the haphazard decisions and coincidences that align to create a life, Second Best is a bittersweet novel exploring what it means to live through failure. a serious author who doesn’t take himself seriously’ L’Express ‘Abounds with Gallic wit and charm’ Waterstones Megan Jones is an in-house translator for Gallic Books and lives in London. Its sentences are wise, humorous, incisive, and simple; they add up to an engrossing reading experience.

Imbuing this slim novel with its gentle, melancholic beauty is a sense of the grandness of small things. Decisive coincidences abound, as when a death in the family of Martin’s babysitter results in his fateful audition. The ten-year-old boy who wasn’t cast as Harry Potter faces a lifetime of anxiety and doubt in David Foenkinos’s poignant novel Second Best. A magical imagining of the fate of a fictional boy whose life is shaped forever when he loses out on the role of Harry Potter. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.