The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair
Joel Dicker, 2012 (Engl. trans., 2014)
Penguin Group (USA)
656 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143126683
Summary
The publishing phenomenon topping bestseller lists around the world
August 30, 1975: the day fifteen-year-old Nola Kellergan is glimpsed fleeing through the woods, never to be heard from again; the day Somerset, New Hampshire, lost its innocence.
Thirty-three years later, Marcus Goldman, a successful young novelist, visits Somerset to see his mentor, Harry Quebert, one of the country’s most respected writers, and to find a cure for his writer’s block as his publisher’s deadline looms. But Marcus’s plans are violently upended when Harry is suddenly and sensationally implicated in the cold-case murder of Nola Kellergan—whom, he admits, he had an affair with.
As the national media convicts Harry, Marcus launches his own investigation, following a trail of clues through his mentor’s books, the backwoods and isolated beaches of New Hampshire, and the hidden history of Somerset’s citizens and the man they hold most dear. To save Harry, his own writing career, and eventually even himself, Marcus must answer three questions, all of which are mysteriously connected:
—Who killed Nola Kellergan?
—What happened one misty morning in Somerset in the summer of 1975?
—And how do you write a book to save someone’s life?
A chart-topping worldwide phenomenon, with sales approaching a million copies in France alone and rights sold in more than thirty countries, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair is a fast-paced, tightly plotted, cinematic literary thriller, and an ingenious book within a book, by a dazzling young writer. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 16, 1985
• Where— Geneva, Switzerland
• Education—M.J.D., University of Geneva
• Awards—Geneva Writers’ Prize; Grand Prix du Roman de l’Academie Francaise
• Currently—lives in Geneva, Switzerland
Joel Dicker is a Swiss novelist from Geneva Switzerland, a French-speaking city. His writing career started when he was a child. At the age of 10, he founded La Gazette des Animaux, a monthly magazine about wildlife. He was its editor-in-chief for seven years. In this capacity he won the Cuneo Prize for the Protection of Nature, and was named “Switzerland’s Youngest Editor-in-Chief” by the Tribune de Genève.
At 19 Dicker left for drama school in Paris, at the Cours Florent. After one year he returned to Switzerland to enroll in law school, where he received his Masters of Law from the University of Geneva in 2010.
Dicker became Europe’s publishing sensation of 2013 when his book La Vérité sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert sold nearly a million copies in France. In 2010, he won the Prix des Ecrivains Genevois (Geneva Writers’ Prize), a prestigious prize for unpublished manuscripts. After his win, the Parisian editor Bernard de Fallois acquired Dicker’s winning submission, "Les Derniers Jours de Nos Pères," and published it in early 2012.
Only six months later, de Fallois published Dicker’s La Vérité sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert (The Truth About the Affair of Henry Quebert) With translation rights sold in 32 languages, the novel has been called “the cleverest, creepiest book you'll read this year.” The worldwide excitement started at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair, where many foreign editors rushed to buy the rights. In late October 2012, La Vérité… (The Truth…) won the 2012 Grand Prix du Roman de l’Academie Francaise.
In summer 2013, La Vérité… knocked Dan Brown’s Inferno from the top of bestseller lists all over Europe. Early readers of the English translation have described the book as “literary and clever” and compared to the fiction of Nabokov and Roth, as well as the television series Twin Peaks, the book became one of the biggest original acquisitions in the history of Penguin Books and was published in the U.S. in 2014. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/7/2014.)
Book Reviews
The cleverest, creepiest book you’ll read this year.... The most talked-about French novel of the decade.... Breathtakingly plotted.... Addictively fast.... It’s like Twin Peaks meets Atonement meets In Cold Blood.... The New England setting [is] immersively convincing..... Very few foreign-language novels make big waves in Anglophone countries, but this one seems genuinely likely to buck the trend.
Telegraph (UK)
With enough plot twists to fill a truck, it is a racy read.... Part master-and-disciple tale, part whodunnit, Mr. Dicker’s thriller is also a postmodern confabulation of timelines and stories, in the manner of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life.
Economist (UK)
[An] In Cold Blood–style investigation of a Twin Peaks–like town.... A smart, immensely readable, impressively plotted page-turner [that] keeps the surprises coming right up to the closing pages.... An immersive, propulsive, continually wrongfooting twister of a tale, it should delight any reader who has felt bereft since finishing Gone Girl, or Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.
Metro (UK)
[It] does well....what all good thrillers should: it twists and turns.... [It] has the pleasing spryness of one of Jessica Fletcher’s outings [in Murder, She Wrote].... Just like a [Harlan] Coben novel, it’s very enjoyable.
Guardian (UK)
If you dip your toes into this major novel, you’re finished: you won’t be able to keep from sprinting through to the last page. You will be manipulated, thrown off course, flabbergasted and amazed by the many twists and turns, red herrings and sudden changes of direction in this exuberant story.
Journal du Dimanche (France)
A master stroke.... A crime novel with not one plot line but many, full of shifting rhythms, changes of course and multiple layers that, like a Russian doll, slot together beautifully.... In maestro form, Dicker alternates periods and genres (police reports, interviews, excerpts from novels) and explores America in all its excesses—media, literary, religious—all the while questioning the role of the literary writer.
L’Express (France)
Dizzying, like the best American thrillers.... Rich in subplots and twists, moving backwards and forwards in time, containing books within books.
Le Figaro (France)
[A]n ambitious, multilayered novel of suspense that’s already an international bestseller.... Marcus sets out to clear Harry’s name—and promises his publisher to write a book about the experience. While at times unwieldy and repetitive, this tale of fame, friendship, loyalty, and fiction versus reality moves at warp speed.
Publishers Weekly
A missing girl, small-town secrets and literary ambition drive this busy, entertaining debut thriller.... Dicker keeps the prose simple and the pace snappy in a plot that winds up with more twists than a Twizzler....Nola's precociousness strains plausibility, and a demon ex machina out of Alabama is one twist too many—or maybe it's Dicker enjoying himself too much.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. While you were reading the novel, were you conscious of the fact that it was originally written in French?
2. Were Harry and Nola in love? Is true love possible between an adult in his thirties and a fifteen-year-old adolescent?
3. There are no explicit sex scenes between Harry and Nola in the novel. Is it possible that their relationship was unconsummated?
4. How well do you think Dicker captured small-town American life? Are the Quinns a typical American family?
5. Is Marcus a reliable narrator?
6. Do you agree with Marcus’s ultimate decision to write a book about “The Harry Quebert Affair”? What would you have done in his position?
Spoiler Alert for the next set of questions
7. Who was Nola Kellergan: a victim, a seductress, or something else?
8. Elijah Stern goes to great lengths to atone for the crime he committed in his youth. Did his actions adequately compensate his victim?
9. Was Harry, in part, to blame for Nola’s death because of the way he misled Jenny Quinn?
10. How did the truth about The Origin of Evil affect your opinion of Harry? Should he have publicly admitted that it was really written by someone else?
11. Did you suspect the identity of the true killer?
12. Were you satisfied that justice had been served?
(Questions issued by publisher.)