The 7th Function of Language - Couverture souple

'One of the funniest, most riotously inventive and enjoyable novels you’ll read this year' - Observer

Roland Barthes is knocked down in a Paris street by a laundry van. It’s February 1980 and he has just come from lunch with Francois Mitterrand, a slippery politician locked in a battle for the Presidency. Barthes dies soon afterwards. History tells us it was an accident.

But what if it were an assassination? What if Barthes was carrying a document of unbelievable, global importance? A document explaining the seventh function of language – an idea so powerful it gives whoever masters it the ability to convince anyone, in any situation, to do anything.

Police Captain Jacques Bayard and his reluctant accomplice Simon Herzog set off on a chase that takes them from the corridors of power and academia to backstreet saunas and midnight rendezvous. What they discover is a worldwide conspiracy involving the President, murderous Bulgarians and a secret international debating society.

In the world of intellectuals and politicians, everyone is a suspect. Who can you trust when the idea of truth itself is at stake?

"Establishes Laurent Binet as the clear heir to the late Umberto Eco, writing novels that are both brilliant and playful, dense with ideas while never losing sight of their need to entertain... One of the funniest, most riotously inventive and enjoyable novels you’ll read this year" (Alex Preston Observer)

"A hugely entertaining novel, taking delight in its own twists and turns" (Nicholas Lezard Spectator)

"Lively, earthy, experimental, ambitious, clever and endlessly entertaining... Smart, witty, direct, cool" (Hal Jensen The Times Literary Supplement)

"The premise is a stroke of genius. Roland Barthes did not die following an accident in 1980; he was murdered... The strands of the plot are skilfully interwoven through a dual process of fictionalisation of the real and realisation of the fictional" (Andrew Gallix Financial Times)

"An almost filmic detective romp, taking in glamorous international locations, killer dogs, Bulgarian secret agents, several varieties of sex and wild car chases" (Andrew Hussey Literary Review)