Virginie Despentes

The book offers a gritty description of underground Parisian society on the verge of its demise. The death of Alex Bleach, a French rock icon, has affected all his fans, including Vernon Subutex, a record shop owner who is beginning to realize that his world is slowly coming to an end. His generation of rock DJs has grown old and lost all its meaning. For Vernon, the situation looks all the more problematic when it comes to light that the dead rock musician has given him recordings of his intimate confessions. Suddenly, he becomes the focal point of attention, and crowds of wild Paris characters are hot on his trail. But who really is Vernon Subutex, whose name combines the pseudonym of Boris Vian (Vernon Sullivan) and an addictive drug?

Published by Garamond, 2023

Virginie Despentes (* 1969) is a French writer and filmmaker. She has made her living as a cleaner, a saleswoman, a journalist, but also as a sex worker. Since 1993, she has been writing books for which she has won several literary awards. Her novel Apocalypse Baby (Apocalypse bébé) was published in Czech in 2012. In her work, she draws on her own experiences of a harsh life on the margins of society, marked by poverty or gender roles, as well as phenomena such as drugs and pornography