These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. 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. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. 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.

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. 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 . 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. Imbuing this slim novel with its gentle, melancholic beauty is a sense of the grandness of small things.So much space on the page visually transforms each paragraph into a stanza, while lending the words a solemn weight and power .

An elegant, irresistibly farcical comic mystery based around a library of rejected manuscripts, Foenkinos' playful satire is the perfect feelgood read. His father dies; his mother leaves him alone with sadistic boyfriends who lock him in his room; a date is aborted when Martin sees The Chamber of Secrets on Mathilde’s bookshelf and has a panic attack. Its sentences are wise, humorous, incisive, and simple; they add up to an engrossing reading experience. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. 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.

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.

Broken into four parts, each consisting of tens of chapters, the writing comes in short, poetic bursts. 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. 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. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit.