03: A Novel

"From the bus stop across the street, it was hard to tell, but suddenly I understood, seeing the passengers in the van that picked her up every morning, that she was slightly retarded."

A precocious teenager in a French suburb finds himself powerfully, troublingly drawn to the girl he sees every day on the way to school. As he watches and thinks about her, his daydreams--full of lyrics from Joy Division and the Smiths, fairy tales, Flowers for Algernon, sexual desire and fear, loneliness, rage for escape, impatience to grow up--reveal an entire adolescence. And this fleeting erotic obsession, remembered years later, blossoms into a meditation on what it means to be a smart kid, what it means to be dumb, and what it means to be in love with another person.

03 is a book about young love like none you have ever read. It marks the English-language debut of a unique French writer--one of the great stylists of his generation.

Author: Jean-Christophe Valtat
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 06/22/2010
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.23lbs
Size: 8.08h x 5.62w x 0.28d
ISBN: 9780374100216

About the Author

Jean-Christophe Valtat teaches comparative literature at Clermont-Ferrand University. He is the author of two novels and a story collection.

Mitzi Angel is the publisher of Faber and Faber, Inc.