The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild

From the winner of the Prix Goncourt, an exciting comic masterwork rooted in the French countryside.

But what David doesn't yet know is that here, in this seemingly ordinary place, once the stage for wars and revolutions, Death leads a dance: when one thing perishes, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human, or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. And once a year, Death and the living observe a temporary truce during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, drink, and language.

Brimming with Mathias Énard's...characteristic wit & encyclopedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess.

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Mathias Énard studied Persian & Arabic & has spent long periods in the Middle East. He has won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter & the Prix Décembre, & won the Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de l’Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée, & the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt for Compass.