The Agents
Nineteen Eighty-Four meets Tron, via The Office, in this boldly dystopian novel
The agents don't know what they're agents of, but they're very busy agenting, which means watching endless data feeds in their cubicles, cubicles that are piled one on top of another in a massive tower in which the agents both live and work. Empty floors serve as battlefields where different guilds of agents fight for territory. It seems that defenestration is the only way out, the 'ballet of suicides.'
It is here we meet Théodore, who has amputated his own toes and must maintain a 30-degree angle to keep his balance. And Solveig, who is pregnant, though agents don't usually have sex, as well as the artist Lazslo and self-mutilating Clara. And then there's Hick, the new agent, who seems strangely happy and occupies a cubicle that is strategically very important.
The battle for key territory is heating up, and the agents aren't sure which of them will make it out alive. If, indeed, that's what any of them want...
The author of the acclaimed The Laws of the Skies turns his hand from literary horror to futuristic dystopianism in this unforgettable marriage between The Office, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Tron.
"Unflinching in its savagery, the nightmarish poetry of this modern Lord of the Flies is undeniable." --Publishers Weekly starred review on The Laws of the Skies
"A haunting book, if you can keep reading." --LitHub on The Laws of the Skies
"The Law of the Skies is not an easy book to digest . . . but I found it exhilarating to read a novel that's this unflinching, this nihilistic, and also this deeply profound." --Locus Magazine
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Grégoire Courtois lives and works in Burgundy, where he runs the independent bookstore Obliques, which he bought in 2011. A novelist and playwright, he has published three novels with Le Quartanier: Révolution (2011), Suréquipée (2015), and Les lois du ciel (2016). In 2013 he founded Caractères, an international book festival in Auxerre, which he continues to run.
Rhonda Mullins is a writer and translator. She received the 2015 Governor General's Literary Award for Twenty-One Cardinals, her translation of Jocelyne Saucier's Les héritiers de la mine. And the Birds Rained Down, her translation of Jocelyne Saucier's Il pleuvait des oiseaux, was a CBC Canada Reads Selection. It was also shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award, as were her translations of Élise Turcotte's Guyana and Hervé Fischer's The Decline of the Hollywood Empire. Rhonda currently lives in Montréal.
