HEADLINER
Literature and Fiction
A MAGNIFICENT LOSER
Florence Seyvos first came to the forefront 30 years ago with Les Apparitions (Prix Goncourt for Best First Novel), she is also a screenwriter. This story was inspired by her 1980s childhood which she spent in Le Havre and the Ivory Coast.
The story starts in Le Havre, when Anna is 16. She lives with her older sister Irène and their mother, Maud. Young Anna is keeping her stepfather, Jacques, company. He is visiting France before returning to Abidjan, where he is trying to launch an agricultural machinery business and where her family lived for a while. Jacques is both authoritarian and a fantasist. He has no friends and a phenomenal overdraft at the bank, which does not stop him from buying palatial furniture on a whim - a chest of drawers, a wing chair, a Louis XVI desk, and the icing on the cake, a large piano all of which he has had delivered to her family home.
Jacques is "a lost loser who gives the book its unique, almost hypnotic rhythm, and a strangeness that is quite magnificent," declares Le Monde des livres. Florence Seyvos does not, in any way, denounce a toxic masculinity, she in fact paints a nuanced portrait of a man through the melancholic gaze of her narrator, using a writing style that is both sober and tense.
"Life with him was as difficult as climbing a high mountain: every moment he determined the landscape, the cliffs, the abysses, the astounding views… Yet, something more than his love for us deeply moved us. Maybe it was simply his madness," recalls Anna, the narrator of this story, 40 years later.
"This novel bears witness to a time when children were immersed in a Bohemian atmosphere that was as fertile as it was disturbing. It was one type of education among many. Her past contributed to forging the narrator's finesse and sensitivity," says Libération.
A Magnificent Loser, winner of the Inter Book Prize, has seduced readers, journalists and booksellers in France with 40,000 copies sold to date. All agree that this is a superb novel about an adolescence which is told with great accuracy and delicacy.
Katja Petrovic
November 2025
Florence Seyvos first came to the forefront 30 years ago with Les Apparitions (Prix Goncourt for Best First Novel), she is also a screenwriter. This story was inspired by her 1980s childhood which she spent in Le Havre and the Ivory Coast.
The story starts in Le Havre, when Anna is 16. She lives with her older sister Irène and their mother, Maud. Young Anna is keeping her stepfather, Jacques, company. He is visiting France before returning to Abidjan, where he is trying to launch an agricultural machinery business and where her family lived for a while.
Jacques is both authoritarian and a fantasist. He has no friends and a phenomenal overdraft at the bank, which does not stop him from buying palatial furniture on a whim - a chest of drawers, a wing chair, a Louis XVI desk, and the icing on the cake, a large piano all of which he has had delivered to her family home.
Jacques is "a lost loser who gives the book its unique, almost hypnotic rhythm, and a strangeness that is quite magnificent," declares Le Monde des livres. Florence Seyvos does not, in any way, denounce a toxic masculinity, she in fact paints a nuanced portrait of a man through the melancholic gaze of her narrator, using a writing style that is both sober and tense.
"Life with him was as difficult as climbing a high mountain: every moment he determined the landscape, the cliffs, the abysses, the astounding views… Yet, something more than his love for us deeply moved us. Maybe it was simply his madness," recalls Anna, the narrator of this story, 40 years later.
"This novel bears witness to a time when children were immersed in a Bohemian atmosphere that was as fertile as it was disturbing. It was one type of education among many. Her past contributed to forging the narrator's finesse and sensitivity," says Libération.
A Magnificent Loser, winner of the Inter Book Prize, has seduced readers, journalists and booksellers in France with 40,000 copies sold to date. All agree that this is a superb novel about an adolescence which is told with great accuracy and delicacy.
Katja Petrovic
November 2025
November 2025