Holiday in a Coma & Love Lasts Three Years

One night in a Parisian nightclub and the aftermath of a marriage provide the stories for these two novels by Frederic Beigbeder, award-winning author of Windows on the World. In Holiday in a Coma, Marc Marronier, a shallow, superficial, rich Parisian who works as an advertising executive, is invited by his old friend to the opening of a new nightclub called The Shitter (a satirical take on the famous Paris nightclub Les Bains Douche). Taking place over a single unforgettable night, the novel documents everything from the pit-bull bouncer on the door, to the drugs, cocktails and wannabes who frequent the club, and Marcs attempts to seduce a catwalk model any one will do. A catalogue of degeneracy, drugs, sex and decibels, Holiday in a Coma is written with a fury and passion that reflect the author's own relationship with a world and he both loves and loathes. In Love Lasts Three Years, Marc Maronnier has just been divorced and shallow opportunist that he is has decided to write a book about it. He has a theory that love lasts no more than three years, and here recounting the highs and lows of his marriage and taking us through brash nightclubs, vainglorious offices and soulless designer apartments he brings to bear the theoretical and the empirical to prove his point. Both frightening and funny, the book reads like a diary: sometimes tender and real, sometimes fantastical and cruel, peppered with Beigbeders acerbic one-liners and trademark wit.