The Readers’ Room

The acid-soaked satire of Michel Houellebecq meets the metafictional whimsy of Jasper Fforde in this slight but witty send-up of the publishing world from French author Laurain (The Red Notebook). Violaine Lepage is the literary director of a boutique publisher in Paris that has rescued a surprise masterpiece off the slush pile. Now, Sugar Flowers, a debut crime novel by Camille Désencres, is in the running for the prestigious Prix Goncourt. One problem: Nobody in her firm has ever heard of Camille Désencres, and Violaine can’t get the author to commit to appearing at the award ceremony—or anywhere else, for that matter. A bigger problem: Sugar Flowers appears to have foreseen with unerring accuracy a series of murders that has brought the attention of a world-weary detective to the readers’ room. Laurain unspools his mystery of the elusive writer and the clairvoyant novel alongside a number of erudite and surely hard-earned observations about the industry, though the teetering back and forth between whodunit and satire costs his characters the depth that would have made this work more memorable.