We are happy to announce that French author Marin Ledun has become a Pontas client recently. And as a start, we have just sold the French rights for his new novel Les chiens de faïence (Earthenware Dogs) to Éditions du Seuil.
Who is Marin Ledun ?
Born in 1975, Marin Ledun is a novelist and an essayist. He has already published a crime novel at Gallimard,La Guerre des Vanités (Série Noire, 2010), two thrillers at Le Diable Vauvert, Modus Operandi (2007) andMarketing Viral (2008), and he has also written radio plays for France Culture. Doctor in Political Communication, he is also the author of two essays, La Démocratie assistée par ordinateur (2005) andPendant qu’ils comptent les morts (2010), as well as of articles about, among other subjects, the new forms of organization of work. Former executive in a big international company, he now lives with his family in a small village in the South-West of France.
What’s his new novel about ?
Vincent Fournier, an executive stressed by all « backward promotions », is found at his desk at the telephone company where he works with a bullet in his head and sedatives in his stomach. Some of his colleagues have commited suicide by jumping through the window before him. Nobody knows better than Carole Matthieu, the company’s doctor, who and how Vincent Fournier died. It is her job to attend hundreds of exhausted workers, to notify to the bosses the danger of stress, of systematical professional insecurisation. But Carole’s job is also to listen to personal dramas, to reassure, to heal wounded souls... with the adequate means, if one can call a Beretta 92 a blessed help.
Earthenware Dogs is a novel about the dark side of the daily life of thousand employees confronted to the cynical rules and the dehumanizing modern managing procedures.
To be published by Éditions du Seuil in France in March 2011.