The Adversary. A True Story of Monstrous Deception - Emmanuel Carrère;Linda Coverdale

“Justifiably considered the French In Cold Blood” (The Paris Review), The Adversary is a landmark work of true crime—and a deeply personal investigation of inexplicable evil.

“On the Saturday morning of January 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting.”

So begins Emmanuel Carrère’s unclassifiable masterpiece, now newly reissued. The crimes shocked France. For eighteen years, Romand’s life was the model of bourgeois contentment. Peers admired him as a doting family man, a loving son who called his parents every evening, and a respected researcher at the World Health Organization.

But those were all lies: Romand had never graduated from medical school or worked at the WHO. He spent his days wandering in the forest; he supported his family by defrauding relatives. When cracks appeared in his facçade, Romand reacted in a way even he couldn’t explain.

Emmanuel Carrère is “widely understood as France’s greatest writer of nonfiction” (The New York Times Magazine); The Adversary, his account of the life, crimes, and trial of Jean-Claude Romand, is his magnum opus.

Emmanuel Carrère, born in Paris in 1957, is a novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and film producer. He is the award-winning, internationally renowned author of Yoga, 97,196 Words, The Kingdom, Limonov, The Mustache, Class Trip, The Adversary (a New York Times Notable Book), My Life as a Russian Novel, and Lives Other Than My Own, which was awarded the Globe de Cristal for Best Novel in 2010. For Limonov, Carrère received the Prix des Prix Littéraires and the Prix des Prix in 2011 and the Europese Literatuurprijs in 2013.

Linda Coverdale is the award-winning translator of many French works and has been honored with the rank of Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for her contribution to French literature.

Praise for The Adversary

“A fantastic tale that happens to be true, a picture of everyday life with its flesh peeled off.”
—Gary Indiana, author of Rent Boy and Horse Crazy

“[A] savagely intense and utterly compelling investigation by one of France’s finest living writers…this is not just Carrère’s most accessible book, but his best.”
—The Times (London)

“Carrère’s gripping tale of true crime is like the worst nightmare one could have in a marriage—that one day you may wake up next to someone you have never known at all, and whose capacity for self-deception is only surpassed by their capacity for murder.”
—Vincent Bugliosi, author of Helter Skelter

“A chilling and unputdownable book….Imagine a sleek, twenty-first century version of In Cold Blood.”
—The Washington Post Book World

“The Adversary brings together the best qualities of Carrère's books: acute observations of daily life, beautiful writing, and a limpid style that drags you down into the abyss as easily as you might go for a stroll.”
—Le Monde

“Intelligent and lucid….Mr. Carrère's book is a startling exposé of the human capacity to do wrong and our equally startling capacity to look the other way.”
—The New York Times

“As a writer, Carrère is straight berserk; as a storyteller he is so freakishly talented, so unassuming in grace and power that you only realize the hold he's got on you when you attempt to pull away....You say: True crime and Literature? I don't believe it. I say: Believe it.”
—Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“[A] mesmerizing true-crime tale of an apparently ordinary man whose life mutates in the space of a few blood-splattering hours from the realm of Renoir to that of Stephen King.”
—People

“The ‘adversary,’ as Carrère reminds us, is synonymous with ‘Satan’....This is an elegant and deeply unsettling book about a man—a void disguised as a man—who, once he started lying, found he couldn’t stop….The Adversary will haunt you.”
—L.A. Weekly

“A bravura performance, one that showcases the spare language, icy detachment and understatement that are hallmarks of this master stylist.”
—The Dallas Morning News

Praise for Emmanuel Carrère

“If Michel Houellebecq is routinely advanced as France’s greatest living writer of fiction, Carrère, whose prose is no less remarkable for its purity and whose vision is no less broad, is widely understood as France’s greatest writer of nonfiction.”
—The New York Times Magazine

“The current French intellectual scene has produced few such prolific and prodigiously talented personalities as Emmanuel Carrère.”
—The New York Review of Books

“Carrère is masterly both at singling out the telling detail and at grasping and conveying his subject as a whole . . . What is most compelling about his work is the quality of his mind, of his thinking. Of the scourging pressure of his need to understand.”
—Robert Gottlieb, The New York Times Book Review