The 7th Function of Language

A hugely entertaining novel, taking delight in its own twists and turns

Nicholas Lezard, Spectator

Lively, earthy, experimental, ambitious, clever and endlessly entertaining… Smart, witty, direct, cool

Hal Jensen, The Times Literary Supplement

The premise is a stroke of genius. Roland Barthes did not die following an accident in 1980; he was murdered… The strands of the plot are skilfully interwoven through a dual process of fictionalisation of the real and realisation of the fictional

Andrew Gallix, Financial Times

An almost filmic detective romp, taking in glamorous international locations, killer dogs, Bulgarian secret agents, several varieties of sex and wild car chases

Andrew Hussey, Literary Review

A smart spoof thriller, cheekily taking as its cat the most famous Parisian intellectuals in the scene in 1980… It’s all fun and games, ever so clever, and highly self-congratulatory for those of us who wasted years studying the abstruse and ultimately worthless theories of these French thinkers

David Sexton, i

Laurent Binet is possessed of something like Superman’s X-ray vision combined with a million lasers. When he gets something in his sights, that thing is dead. And what he kills in his new novel is literary theory, in all its fake unuseful stupidity…. Reading Binet gives you that rare pleasure of feeling that you’re losing your grip on reality… What Binet can do with a scene, a paragraph, is beyond belief… One suspects Binet will make, or perhaps already has made, a lot of enemies with his jaw-droppingly disrespectful, extremely witty and – yes – heartfelt book. But one thing’s for sure, he’ll know how to handle them

Todd McEwan, Herald

Incredibly timely ... very entertaining, like a dirty Midnight in Paris for the po-mo set

Lauren Elkin, Guardian

On one level it’s a nostalgic look at a period in which French thinkers spent less time brooding on national identity… And on another it’s an exercise in pure intellectual slapstick of the kind that French humourists do well… It’s possible that his novel shares a few shreds of DNA with Zoolander

Christopher Tayler, London Review of Books

A playful conspiracy thriller.

Guardian, 2017 Books of the Year