The defect

Author's name: Hervé Le Tellier

Translated by: Mohamed Ait Hanna

In June 2021, an accident upends the lives of a group of men and women. Their common denominator: they're all passengers on a flight from Paris to New York. A strange assortment of characters, chosen with care and randomness by Hervé Letellier (Blake, living a double life: a hired killer and an ideal family man; Slim Boy, a Nigerian rapper tired of living a lie; Victor Miezil, a marginalized writer who, with his death, becomes a literary legend). All of these characters believed they were leading secret lives, and none of them explored the extent of their secrecy. A novel of genius construction, in which the logical intersects with the fantastic, it pushes the reader to explore the hidden part of himself. Its fundamental lesson: there is no room to talk about dysfunction except within a well-defined system. The novel won the 2020 Congo Prize, and there is no better crowning achievement and expression of a year that was a "disruption" in the flow of time.