From the winner of the Prix Goncourt, an exciting new comic masterwork rooted in the French countryside

Available October 3, 2023

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild

Fiction by Mathias Énard

With a contribution by Frank Wynne

Cover design by John Gall

To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to understand the essence of the local culture, the intrepid young scholar scurries around restlessly on his moped to interview residents.

But what David doesn’t yet know is that here, in this seemingly ordinary place, once the stage for wars and revolutions, Death leads a dance: when one thing perishes, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human, or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. And once a year, Death and the living observe a temporary truce during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, drink, and language …

Brimming with Mathias Énard’s characteristic wit and encyclopedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess.

Buy from:

Paperback (published October 3, 2023)

ISBN
9780811231299
Price US
19.95
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
432

Ebook

ISBN
9780811231305

Mathias Énard

Prix Goncourt winning French novelist