Mammals

All families owe it to themselves to have a failure: a family without a failure is not truly a family, for it lacks an element which challenges it and thereby confirms its legitimacy.

Mammals is a cruel and comic tale of love, solitude, family life, drinking and unemployment. Forty-year-old Uncle reminisces about his life and past loves. He drinks, he is emotional, he writes bad poetry and he teaches at a high school. He belongs to the ranks of the humiliated, rejected, wounded and orphaned. He is, in short, a loser. Once he had a great capacity for love, and enjoyed its fruits, but if it is possible to die—to physically die—from lack of love, then Uncle is dying.

Praise for Mammals:

'Like Houellebecq only funnier.'

Paris-Match

'Fasten your seatbelts, this will blow you away.'

Lire

'Funny, mischievous, unhoped for, and written so perfectly. In a word, brilliant.'

Le Figaro

‘The subject matter is contemporary life, ruthlessly dissected in a meandering narrative that is so spot-on, so critically clever, it will make the reader nod in recognition, wince in pain and laugh out loud, possibly all at the same time.’

Courier-Mail