The Deserters

‘Mathias Enard is one of the best contemporary French writers, and his works - ambitious, erudite, multifaceted, surprising and unconventional - are always worth reading, because they always strike a perfect balance between the best that literature can offer: pleasure and knowledge.’ - Javier Cercas, author of The Impostor‘Every novel by Mathias Enard reminds me of the reasons why I read fiction. He is ambitious, erudite, full of life, and a wonderful stylist to boot. He is one of the great novelists of our time.’ - Juan Gabriel Vasquez, author of The Shape of the Ruins‘All of Enard’s books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He’s the composer of a discomposing age.’ - Joshua Cohen, New York Times‘A novelist like Enard feels particularly necessary right now, though to say this may actually be to undersell his work. He is not a polemicist but an artist, one whose novels will always have something to say to us.’ - Christopher Beha, Harper’s‘The most brazenly lapel-grabbing French writer since Michel Houellebecq.’ - Leo Robson, New Statesman

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.

Charlotte Mandell has translated over fifty books of fiction, poetry and philosophy from French, including works by Marcel Proust, Maurice Blanchot, Abdelwahab Meddeb and Jean-Luc Nancy. Her translation of Compass by Mathias Énard was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and was the recipient of the 2018 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose. She was recently named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and has received the Thornton Wilder Translation Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.