Dear Dickhead

The French novel taking the world by storm: an ultracontemporary Dangerous Liaisons about sex, feminism, and addiction.

Dear Dickhead,
I read the piece you posted on your Insta. You're like a pigeon shitting on my shoulder as you flap past. Congratulations: you've had your fifteen minutes of fame. The proof? The fact that I bothered to write to you.

Oscar is a B-list novelist in his forties. He used to be an alcoholic and a cokehead, but now he keeps himself busy by ranting on social media. When Rebecca, an actress whose looks he insulted, sends him an angry email, they strike up a combative correspondence - at the very moment that Oscar is accused of sexual harassment by his former publicist. What ensues is a no-holds-barred conversation about life under the patriarchy, and above all about addiction - to drugs, to alcohol, to the internet, to rage.

Virginie Despentes, the celebrated author of King Kong Theory, has written her breakthrough book: a Dangerous Liaisons for our time. We follow Rebecca and Oscar as they develop an unlikely friendship and argue over questions of right and wrong in a city - Paris - where pleasure, excess, and freedom rule the day, or used to. Dear Dickhead is a guns-blazing novel about a culture that makes men and women sick, and about how the search for feeling leaves us addicted to what makes us feel. The result is a provocative and unmissable book from the author hailed by The Guardian as France's "rock and roll Zola."

Translated from the original French by Frank Wynne