The Investigation - Tapa dura

'Claudel achieves something close to the truly Kafkaesque' Sunday Telegraph. (Sunday Telegraph)

'The novel is frequently very funny, but it also skillfully evokes the insidious, modern fear that we, like the Investigator, are playing bit parts in some vast, incomprehensible system' Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal. (Wall Street Journal)

'The twists develop with venomous imagination and the wider themes are elegantly explored' Sunday Times. (Sunday Times)

'There is something higher at work here; what that something is, is for the reader to puzzle over long after the story that never begins, has ended' Sunday Business Post. (Sunday Business Post)

'Though the message is bleak, [The Investigation] is written with such relish, inventiveness, imagination and brio, that it is consistently entertaining' The Scotsman. (Scotsman)

The Investigator is despatched to a provincial town to find out the truth behind a disturbing spate of suicides amongst employees of The Firm. But from the moment he steps off the train, he finds himself in a world that is alien, unrecognisable, and diabolically complex. From the hostile weather and the fickle hospitality at Hotel Hope to the town's bewildering inhabitants, everything seems to be against him to the point where he wonders whether he is trapped in a recurring nightmare, or has passed into the realm of death itself. Cold, hungry and humiliated, and always one step behind, he nevertheless remains determined to find the only man he can hold to account - The Firm's legendary but elusive founder. The Investigation is an enthralling fable in which our own world is turned on its head, and where the only answers are more questions. Philippe Claudel - author of Brodeck's Report and Monsieur Linh and His Child - is one of Europe's most daring and versatile novelists.