The Endless Week [Paperback]

From the 2023 winner of the Prix Goncourt for poetry comes a debut novel unlike any other, a lyrical anti-epic about the beauty, violence, trauma, and absurdity of the internet age.

Like Beckett’s novels or Kafka’s stranger tales, The Endless Week is a work outside of time, as if novels had never existed and Laura Vazquez has suddenly invented them. And yet it could not be more contemporary, as startling and constantly new as the scrolling hyper-mediated reality it chronicles. Its characters are Salim, a young poet, and his sister Sara, who rarely leave home except virtually; their father, who is falling apart; and their grandmother, who is dying. To save their grandmother, Salim and Sara set out in search of their long-lost mother, accompanied by Salim’s online friend Jonathan, though their real quest is through the landscape of language and suffering that saturates both the real world and the virtual. The Endless Week is sharp and ever-shifting, at turns hilarious, tender, satirical, and terrifying. Not much happens, yet every moment is compulsively engaging. It is a major work by one of the most fearlessly original writers of our time. [Vazquez's] prose has a marked propulsive power. It also serves to defamiliarize. There is a dreamlike quality to her writing, reminiscent of Kafka, Beckett and Dostoevsky . . . and a demand that we consider language anew, stepping away from the 'world of lies.' —Alice Blackhurst, Times Literary Supplement

“It’s hard not to start with ‘wow.’ This is an astonishing piece of fiction from France. . . . Vazquez is a virtuosa.” — Melanie Fleishman, Center for Fiction

Dark and deep, a pool of black ink . . . It’s rare to encounter a book as feral and lovely as 'The Endless Week,' one equally fluenló)