Mathias Enard, born in 1972, studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre, and won the Choix Goncourt de l’Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée and the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves. For Compass, he won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, the 2017 Leipziger Book Award for European Understanding, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and was shortlisted for the 2017 International Booker Prize. The Deserters is his sixth novel to appear with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

‘A heady and ambiguous mix of images, letters, admissions and reprisals from decades past … feature the rich, densely poetic language that readers of Énard may recall from previous works like Zone and Compass, a kind of neo-modernism replete with bits of interior monologue and adventurous indentation. (Credit the translator Charlotte Mandell, adept in both registers.) In this artful and sad novel, forbearance is courage. The donkey – Énard’s quiet, Bressonian hero – endures its suffering with a moving stoicism. Refusing to desert its companions, it abides trials and privations in one ordeal after another. In the fallen world of TheDeserters this persistence is indistinguishable from grace.’— Dustin Illingworth, New York Times

Mathias Enard, born in 1972, studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre, and won the Choix Goncourt de l’Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée and the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves. For Compass, he won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, the 2017 Leipziger Book Award for European Understanding, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and was shortlisted for the 2017 International Booker Prize. The Deserters is his sixth novel to appear with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

‘A heady and ambiguous mix of images, letters, admissions and reprisals from decades past … feature the rich, densely poetic language that readers of Énard may recall from previous works like Zone and Compass, a kind of neo-modernism replete with bits of interior monologue and adventurous indentation. (Credit the translator Charlotte Mandell, adept in both registers.) In this artful and sad novel, forbearance is courage. The donkey – Énard’s quiet, Bressonian hero – endures its suffering with a moving stoicism. Refusing to desert its companions, it abides trials and privations in one ordeal after another. In the fallen world of TheDeserters this persistence is indistinguishable from grace.’— Dustin Illingworth, New York Times