A furious, funny and unexpectedly compassionate portrait of a society coming apart at the seams.

Once the owner of a legendary Paris record shop, Vernon Subutex finds himself unemployed, broke and gradually slipping into homelessness after the death of an old friend. As he moves from one borrowed sofa to another, the novel expands into an extraordinary social panorama, bringing together former punks, financiers, sex workers, actors, conspiracy theorists, ageing rock musicians and suburban professionals. Rather than centring a single protagonist, Despentes uses Vernon as a thread connecting an entire generation left behind by neoliberalism and the collapse of shared cultural life.

Originally published in French in 2015, the novel became an immediate phenomenon, shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize after Frank Wynne's acclaimed English translation. It combines the pace of a social comedy with the sharpness of political satire, examining class, ageing, masculinity, misogyny, precarity, celebrity and digital culture without reducing its characters to symbols. 

2018 MacLehose Press paperback edition. Very good condition with light shelf wear and a clean, unmarked interior.