Guillaume Musso is one of my favourite thriller authors from France. Two others I would like to mention are Fred Vargas and Michel Bussi. I have read one book by Musso before, The Reunion (La jeune fille et la nuit). La vie secrète des écrivains (Öns hemlighet/The Secret Life of Writers) turns out to be part two in a trilogie, which I did not know. Lucky for me, The Reunion is the first part and this one is the second. That leaves the third, La vie est un roman. Unfortunately, it seems not to be translated to English or Swedish yet.
On Guillaume Musso's website there is a short explanation of this trilogi.
"Through these three novels Musso finds different perspectives to tell his captivating stories, and they are captivating. I especially like his story telling which often is surprising. In these three novels he shares his passion for writing and the dizziness that arises from the interplay between fiction and reality.
In The Reunion, a writer is overtaken by a crime committed in his youth and by a love never forgotten.
In The Secret Life of Writers, a famous novelist who has chosen silence for twenty years is forced to come out of his reserve.
In La vie est un roman, the disappearance of a novelist's granddaughter gives rise to a hand-to-hand combat between the real world and the fictional world."
In 1999, after publishing three cult novels, celebrated author Nathan Fawles announces the end of his writing career and withdraws to Beaumont, a wild and beautiful island off the Mediterranean coast.
Autumn 2018. As Fawles’ novels continue to captivate readers, Mathilde Monney, a young Swiss journalist, arrives on the island, determined to unlock the writer’s secrets and secure his first interview in twenty years.
That same day, a woman’s body is discovered on the beach and the island is cordoned off by the authorities.
And so, begins a dangerous face off between Mathilde and Nathan, in which the line between truth and fiction becomes increasingly blurred…
(From Goodreads)
The story is told from several narrators, and with every narrator you get a different story. They do come together in the end, but before that you have guessed the outcome a number of times ... all of them wrong.
After having retreated from the world 20 years earlier, Nathan Fowles is all of a sudden 'hunted' by a few admirers. An aspiring author, a Swiss journalist and a presumtive Guillaume Musso, all of them trying to get close to Fowles and find out his secret. They all have a different reason, and a different drive to try to find him. Before the story reach its end, it has taken us through the early life of Fowles and his reason to retreat from the world. When a murder victim turns up on the island the story takes another turn. Who is the victim? Why did the body turn up on the island? What is behind the murder?
Musso takes us through a straight story, into a mysterious one, a doubtful one, and a surprising one. Nothing is what it seems to be in this story of illusion, fiction and reality. And the end is totally surprising.
Musso's stories are captivating and it is difficult to put the book down. This was no exception, and even know, a couple of weeks later the story stays with me. I can hardly wait until the last chapter of the trilogie is translated.
Loved it a lot. Not sure actually why it's presented as a series, I don't really see the connections with book 1. Do you? haaven't read book 3 yet either. Emma @ Words And Peace