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The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain, Emily Boyce (translator) and Jane Aitken (translator)



Meet Laure. She's a widow in her 40s, who is entering her Parisian apartment building one night when she's mugged, and her handbag stolen. Meet Laurent, a middle-aged bookseller, who happens upon the handbag the following morning in the street, just before the binmen take it away, never to be seen again. More or less snubbed when trying to hand it to the police as lost property, he decides to take it upon himself to reunite the bag with its rightful owner. He has no idea their names are so intimately linked, and despite a lot of things being in the bag (including the titular notebook) there is no cash, no phone and no ID documentation at all. What's more – and what looks like making the idea even more fruitless – he has no idea that Laure has fallen into a coma as a result of the mugging…

The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain, Emily Boyce (translator) and Jane Aitken (translator)

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Buy The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain, Emily Boyce (translator) and Jane Aitken (translator) at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

Category: General Fiction
Rating: 5/5
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Reviewed by John Lloyd
Summary: An instant, flawless masterpiece of Parisian perfection.
Buy? Yes Borrow? Yes
Pages: 208 Date: April 2015
Publisher: Gallic Books
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 9781908313867

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This book is, in one word, beautiful. It has some of the spirit and sense of the movie Amelie, but is nowhere near as full-on. It is full of charming serendipity and happenstance – and has befallen one of its own, for since being written it has been given a little fillip all the way from Scandinavia. Only recently the Nobel Prize judges gave the literature award to Patrick Modiano, and he has a cameo in the plot here. That does allow me to flag up the fact that there are several French cultural references and some authorial name-dropping, but that is the nearest thing to something that would hinder the book from crossing over most successfully to an English language audience – something I sincerely hope happens.

It is just a brilliant evocation of two people taking the bull called life by its horns and getting on with things, and provides really warming evidence that when people do good for other people – as these characters generally do – they have more good things befall them. It's not just about the two main characters, for the book takes us with a mixture of less routine narrative styles (the notebook entries that first alert Laurent to the spirit of the woman he seeks, email exchanges) and opens out in surprising ways to find secondary characters and bring them into the plot. It's not the longest book in the world – it has the snappy concision of the novella that on the whole makes the more successful movie adaptation, which I can see happening. Nor is this my longest review ever, but it's one of the rare instances when I can only enthuse about a book, and demand it be looked at. As unconvincing as I feel short write-ups may be, there really is not a bad word to say about this wonderful work of art.

I must thank the publishers for my review copy.

The President's Hat shows the author to be more than adept at such entertaining, short novels. You might also enjoy his The Readers Room.

Booklists.jpg The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain, Emily Boyce (translator) and Jane Aitken (translator) is in the Top Ten Literary Fiction Books of 2015.

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Buy The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain, Emily Boyce (translator) and Jane Aitken (translator) at Amazon You can read more book reviews or buy The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain, Emily Boyce (translator) and Jane Aitken (translator) at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
Buy The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain, Emily Boyce (translator) and Jane Aitken (translator) at Amazon You can read more book reviews or buy The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain, Emily Boyce (translator) and Jane Aitken (translator) at Amazon.com.

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