Perfecting the Shot
Perfecting the Shot
Binding: Paperback,
Date of Publication: 24/09/2026,
Pagination: 172 pages,
Series: N/A,
Imprint: Fitzcarraldo Editions,
Published By: Fitzcarraldo Editions,
Book Classification: Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945),
Dimensions: 197 x 125
ISBN13/EAN/SKU: 9781804272633
In a nameless city torn apart by civil war, a teenage sniper has only one goal: to fire the perfect shot. He sublimates himself into his weapon, learns to maintain impassivity, controls his breath, listens to his body and the beat of his heart. Lying in wait on rooftops, he takes aim at people below while his traumatized mother cowers in their flat. The violence eats away at any sense of morality as he kills civilians and combatants indiscriminately, for the sake of killing itself. His routine is disrupted by the arrival of Myrna, a fifteen-year-old girl hired to care for his mother, and his increasingly disturbing obsession with her soon threatens to push them all into the abyss. Now appearing in English more than twenty years after its original publication, Mathias Enard’s debut novel is a timeless study of how extreme violence corrodes the soul, tracking the convulsions of a brutalized mind in spare, unflinching prose.
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