Ostensibly the story of a servant, Jacques, and his master travelling through France, the novel repeatedly refuses to become the novel it appears to be.

Narratives are interrupted, stories fold into other stories, the narrator argues with the reader, characters question the act of storytelling itself, and chance constantly overwhelms plot. Written between the 1760s and 1770s but published posthumously in 1796, it anticipates literary experiments that would not become commonplace until two centuries later.

Diderot's philosophical concerns—free will and determinism, desire, morality, authority, performance and the instability of truth—are woven into a work that is as comic as it is intellectually playful. Its influence stretches from Sterne and Goethe through to Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino and postmodern metafiction, yet it never feels like a museum piece. David Coward's Oxford World's Classics translation preserves both the wit and conversational energy of the original while providing an excellent introduction and notes. Essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of the modern novel, experimental fiction, or Enlightenment philosophy that delights in undermining its own certainty.

Oxford World's Classics paperback edition (2008 reissue of the 1999 translation). Very good condition with light shelf wear and a clean, unmarked interior.