Football

‘Toussaint is carving out one of the most fascinating literary oeuvres of our times.’
— Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

‘For any serious French writer who has come of age during the last 30 years, one question imposes itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? … Toussaint’s writing is remarkable for its conciseness, its elision. All his books are short, and the shortest of all is La Mélancholie de Zidane, a ten-page essay which Minuit, charmingly but quite properly, published in 2006 as a stand-alone book. Zidane is perhaps the closest Toussaint comes to meta-fiction: in it, he not only revisits all his motifs, but does so with explicit references, dropped in via footnotes, to The Bathroom, Bachelard and Freud.’
— Tom McCarthy, author of Satin Island

‘Toussaint’s prose is a pleasure to read: precise and increasingly muscular. There is a mesmerizing quality to his attention to detail ... that marks him out as a successor to those other Minuit authors, the practitioners of the nouveau roman. But his is also a distinctive and original voice in French fiction.’
— Adrian Tahourdin, Times Literary Supplement

‘That there is nothing like this being written in English at the moment should be recommendation enough to the curious reader.’
— Jonathan Gibbs, Independent

‘Toussaint has established himself as one of contemporary French literature’s most distinctive voices, turning the existential tradition into something lighter, warmer and ultimately more open.’
— Juliet Jacques, New Statesman