Second Best

Product Information

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. 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. Its sentences are wise, humorous, incisive, and simple; they add up to an engrossing reading experience. 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. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall).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.

So much space on the page visually transforms each paragraph into a stanza, while lending the words a solemn weight and power .Imbuing this slim novel with its gentle, melancholic beauty is a sense of the grandness of small things. 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 . Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit.

Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. Embroidering the edges of Martin’s story are dozens of other tangential narratives, ranging from the story of how his parents first met to coverage of the path that J. be ‘An inventive novel about rebuilding after failure, no matter how powerful or vast it may be’ actualitte. 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 . Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer.