Babylon

A Novel

by Yasmina Reza

Winner of the Prix Renaudot

Translated by Linda Asher

Elisabeth, a pensive, memory-laden science professional in a long and tender marriage, has barely befriended their touching younger neighbor when in a fit of blind pain over a scornful scolding the man kills his beloved and appealing wife. Elisabeth is drawn, out of sympathy, to help her sad friend cover up his crime. Her account of her unaccountable impulse moves into a quick-moving, canny police procedural—humor and sorrow, life. An absorbing tale from the skilled hand of playwright/novelist Yasmina Reza.

Collected in

New at Seven Stories Summer & Fall 2018

Buying options

Hardback

$19.16

$23.95

Publish Date: 2018-08-07

ISBN: 9781609808327

Pages: 208

Ebook

$9.59

$15.99

Publish Date: 2018-08-07

ISBN: 9781609808334

Pages:

“[I]n Reza’s work, characters have always been inclined to go too far, to act out the impulses most of us keep in check. . . . Reza is the bard of bourgeois, neoliberal angst.”

– Erica Wagner, New York Times Book Review, 07 September 2018

“Babylon, translated from the French by Linda Asher, gives away its story early and belongs to that very popular category of books that use techniques of the thriller and mystery genre in what is essentially a character study. A whydunit, rather than a whodunit, so to speak. In this, it is reminiscent in some ways of Leïla Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny ... Reza attempts to elevate what her characters experience in their limited domestic sphere to a universal tale about how certain fears unite and drive us toward inexplicable acts. It is this push for universality that makes the novel hypnotic, often poetic.”

– Barbara Halla, Asymptote, 30 August 2018

Playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza's work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. Her play Art was the first non-English language play to win a Tony Award, Conversations After a Burial, The Unexpected Man, and Life X 3 have all been award-winning critical and commercial successes internationally, and God of Carnage, which also won a Tony Award, was adapted for film by Roman Polanski. A new play, Bella Figura, premiered in Germany in May 2015. Her fiction includes Hammerklavier, Desolation, and Adam Haberberg. Reza lives in Paris.