Lit in Translation

Apocalypse Baby

Apocalypse bébé

Virginie Despentes (born 1969)

Translated by Siân Reynolds

English editions

In English

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Lucie Toledo, a thirty-something private investigator who scrapes a living shadowing husbands, wives and teenagers, is hired by a Paris writer and his mother to follow his fifteen-year-old daughter Valentine, a troubled girl skipping school whom they suspect of living a secret life. When Lucie loses track of her in the metro and the girl vanishes, the furious family insists she be found. Out of her depth, Lucie teams up with a feared, aggressive lesbian investigator known as the Hyena. Together they question the people around Valentine, from friends and casual lovers to the mother who walked out when she was a baby, and the hunt leads them to Barcelona. The case grows far more tangled than expected, and the novel uses it for a satirical, often brutal look at contemporary society.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form
Novel
Length
342 pages in the original
Genres
Crime, Satire (assigned by AI)
Set in
France, Spain
First published
2010 by Grasset
Author's age
41 when first published
ISBN

9782246771715 (original)

9781846688423 (Serpent's Tail, United Kingdom)

9781558618916 (Feminist Press, United States)

More
Wikidata