Second Best

Product Information

The ten-year-old boy who wasn’t cast as Harry Potter faces a lifetime of anxiety and doubt in David Foenkinos’s poignant novel Second Best. Praise for Second Best: ‘A witty and heartfelt portrait of what happens when luck does not go your way. Embroidering the edges of Martin’s story are dozens of other tangential narratives, ranging from the story of how his parents first met to coverage of the path that J. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer.

Foenkinos’ smash-hit Second Best is a playful, poignant story about fate, loss and how the lives we wish we’d led might not be all they’re cracked up to be . Imbuing this slim novel with its gentle, melancholic beauty is a sense of the grandness of small things.Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. An elegant, irresistibly farcical comic mystery based around a library of rejected manuscripts, Foenkinos' playful satire is the perfect feelgood read. Broken into four parts, each consisting of tens of chapters, the writing comes in short, poetic bursts. be ‘An inventive novel about rebuilding after failure, no matter how powerful or vast it may be’ actualitte. Foenkinos’s] sensitive and empathetic handling of the theme of the also-ran is as instructive as it is entertaining’ Irish Times ‘A brilliant concept for a novel’ Sunday Times ‘Foenkinos has had a gem of an idea .

It also shows, more generally, what happens when a society is subject to the endless Instagram audition, the tyranny of the sight of other people’s happiness . A magical imagining of the fate of a fictional boy whose life is shaped forever when he loses out on the role of Harry Potter. His father dies; his mother leaves him alone with sadistic boyfriends who lock him in his room; a date is aborted when Martin sees The Chamber of Secrets on Mathilde’s bookshelf and has a panic attack. com Praise for David Foenkinos: ‘Light, funny and erudite: a delight’ The Guardian ‘Charming, clever’ The Independent ‘A completely delightful jeu d’esprit’ Daily Mail ‘Unputdownable . These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.Decisive coincidences abound, as when a death in the family of Martin’s babysitter results in his fateful audition. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. Foenkinos’s smash-hit Second Best is a playful, poignant story about fate, loss and how the lives we wish we’d led might not be all they’re cracked up to be .

Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). Its sentences are wise, humorous, incisive, and simple; they add up to an engrossing reading experience.

The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. Stumbling from therapists and psychological hospitals to remarkable success as a student and a Louvre attendant, Martin grows up blinded by the life he isn’t living. A genealogy of the haphazard decisions and coincidences that align to create a life, Second Best is a bittersweet novel exploring what it means to live through failure. Every line has something profound to say about love and loss, hope and fear, time and memory, and the enduring power of art' Andrew Michael Hurley, author of The Loney.