Did you love The Great Swindle by Pierre Lemaître? Discover his new novel and the story of a mysterious man ready to sacrifice everything to regain his dignity.
Alain Delambre is a 57-year-old former HR executive, drained by four years of hopeless unemployment. All he is offered are small, demoralizing jobs. He has reached his very lowest ebb, and can see no way out. So when a major company finally invites him to an interview, Alain Delambre is ready to do anything, borrow money, shame his wife and his daughters and even participate in the ultimate recruitment test: a role-playing game that involves hostage-taking. Alain Delambre commits body and soul in this struggle to regain his dignity. But if he suddenly realised that the dice had been loaded against him from the start, his fury would be limitless. And what began as a role-playing game could quickly become a bloodbath.
Inhuman Resources is written by Prix Goncourt winner Pierre Lemaître, translated by Sam Gordon and published by MacLehose Press.
Pierre Lemaître was born in Paris in 1951. He worked for many years as a teacher of literature before becoming a novelist. He was awarded the Crime Writers' Association International Dagger, alongside Fred Vargas, for Alex, and as sole winner for Camille, The Great Swindle and for Blood Wedding in 2016. In 2013 his novel Au revoir là-haut (The Great Swindle, in English translation) won the Prix Goncourt, France's leading literary award.
Sam Gordon is a London-based freelance translator working from French and Spanish into English. He has translated work by writers as varied as Pierre Reverdy, Marcel Schwob, Timothée de Fombelle, Nicolás di Candia and Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez. Other non-literary translation work focuses on the fields of advertising, marketing, tourism and food/wine. Arab Jazz by Karim Miské (MacLehose Press, 2014) is his first novel-length translation.
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