Perfecting the Shot

In a city torn apart by civil war, a teenage sniper has only one goal: to fire the perfect shot. He sublimates himself into his weapon, practices controlling his breath, staying calm, listening to his body and the beat of his heart. Consumed for too long by violence and turned agent of pure destruction and despair, he lies in wait on rooftops, killing civilians while his mentally ill mother cowers in their flat. His routine is disrupted by the arrival of Myrna, a fifteen-year-old girl hired to care for her, and towards whom he develops a disturbing obsession in which she finds herself trapped. Now published in English for the first time, Mathias Enard's debut novel is an unrelenting work whose harrowing immediacy belies its lyricism, exposing how extreme violence corrodes the soul and leaves no part of life unscathed.



Mathias Enard, born in 1972, studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre, and won the Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de l'Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée and the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, the 2017 Leipziger Book Award for European Understanding, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for Compass. Perfecting the Shot is his seventh novel to appear with Fitzcarraldo Editions.