Underground Time

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE GONCOURT PRIZE

Translated from the French by George Miller

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''One of those books that grabs you and demands to be read'' - Clare Morrall

''Delphine de Vigan is a sensation'' - Observer

''Sympathetic, compelling, enjoyable'' - Guardian

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Every day Mathilde takes the Metro, then the commuter train to the office of a large multi-national where she works in the marketing department. Every day, the same routine, the same trains. But something happened a while ago - she dared to voice a different opinion from her moody boss, Jacques. Bit by bit she finds herself frozen out of everything, with no work to do.

Thibault is a paramedic. Every day he drives to the addresses he receives from his controller. The city spares him no grief: traffic jams, elusive parking spaces, delivery trucks blocking his route. He is well aware that he may be the only human being many of the people he visits will see for the entire day and is well acquainted with the symptomatic illnesses, the major disasters, the hustle and bustle and, of course, the immense, pervading loneliness of the city.

Before one day in May, Mathilde and Thibault had never met. They were just two anonymous figures in a crowd, pushed and shoved and pressured continuously by the loveless, urban world.

Underground Time is a novel of quiet violence - the violence of office-bullying, the violence of the brutality of the city - in which our two characters move towards an inevitable meeting.

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''Two solitary existences cross paths in this poignant chronicle, a new testimony to de Vigan''s superb eloquence'' - Lire

''What''s most startling about this novel is how de Vigan makes the mundane come alive. She''s an expert in detail, charging even the most ordinary situation with emotion, which makes for a massively affecting read'' - Psychologies Magazine