The story of a woman’s life, from childhood to death, somewhere in provincial France, from the 1950s to about 2020. The heroine, M.A., has nice parents, does well in school, finds a loving husband, buys a big cookie-cutter house, makes decent money, has children, changes jobs, retires, grows old and dies. All in the comfort that the French middle-class has grown to expect since the 1950s. But she’s bored. She takes up all sorts of outlets to try to make something happen in her life: adultery, humanitarian action, esotericism, manic house-cleaning, motherhood and various hobbies – each one abandoned faster than the last. But no matter what she does, our heroine remains unfocussed and unfulfilled. She can never find anything that truly fulfills her, because inside her – like where she lives – everything is non-descript, flat, horizontal. Her house is literally a dead end.

Sophie Divry’s aim is to provide a mental portrait of individualism, and to portray the philosophical conflict between freedom and comfort.

An exploration of the human condition by the author of The Library of Unrequited Love. Her first novel has been translated into five languages. More than 7,000 copies sold in France, 10,000 in Great Britain and 8,000 in Italy. The heroine is an endearing, contemporary Emma Bovary but The Suburban Condition will remind readers of the best of Houellebecq, the cold, implacable historian who paints a precise portrait of an era