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Perfecting the Shot
Brief Description
In a nameless city torn apart by civil war, a teenage sniper has only one goal: to fire the perfect shot. He sublimates himself into his weapon, learns to maintain impassivity, controls his breath, listens to his body and the beat of his heart. Lying in...
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Now published in English for the first time, Mathias Enard's debut novel exposes how extreme violence corrodes the soul and leaves no part of life unscathed.
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Description
In a nameless city torn apart by civil war, a teenage sniper has only one goal: to fire the perfect shot. He sublimates himself into his weapon, learns to maintain impassivity, controls his breath, listens to his body and the beat of his heart. Lying in wait on rooftops, he takes aim at people below while his traumatised mother cowers in their flat. But the violence eats away at any sense of morality as he kills civilians and combatants indiscriminately, for the sake of killing itself.
His routine is disrupted by the arrival of Myrna, a fifteen-year-old girl hired to care for his mother, and his increasingly disturbing obsession with her soon threatens to push them all into the abyss.
Now appearing in English more than twenty years after its original publication, Mathias Enard's debut novel is a timeless study of how extreme violence corrodes the soul, tracking the convulsions of a brutalised mind in spare, unflinching prose.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781804272633
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 24 September 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Contributors:
- Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 125.0mm
Height: 197.0mm
Weight: 0g
Pages: 172
About the Author
Mathias Enard, born in 1972, studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre, and won the Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de l'Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée and the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, the 2017 Leipziger Book Award for European Understanding, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for Compass. Perfecting the Shot is his seventh novel to appear with Fitzcarraldo Editions.
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