Praise for Second Best: ‘A witty and heartfelt portrait of what happens when luck does not go your way. Stumbling from therapists and psychological hospitals to remarkable success as a student and a Louvre attendant, Martin grows up blinded by the life he isn’t living. A magical imagining of the fate of a fictional boy whose life is shaped forever when he loses out on the role of Harry Potter. It also shows, more generally, what happens when a society is subject to the endless Instagram audition, the tyranny of the sight of other people’s happiness . Every line has something profound to say about love and loss, hope and fear, time and memory, and the enduring power of art' Andrew Michael Hurley, author of The Loney.

A genealogy of the haphazard decisions and coincidences that align to create a life, Second Best is a bittersweet novel exploring what it means to live through failure. Foenkinos’s smash-hit Second Best is a playful, poignant story about fate, loss and how the lives we wish we’d led might not be all they’re cracked up to be . Decisive coincidences abound, as when a death in the family of Martin’s babysitter results in his fateful audition.Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. be ‘An inventive novel about rebuilding after failure, no matter how powerful or vast it may be’ actualitte.

Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). So much space on the page visually transforms each paragraph into a stanza, while lending the words a solemn weight and power .

Broken into four parts, each consisting of tens of chapters, the writing comes in short, poetic bursts.