The Age of Reinvention / L'Invention de Nos Vies - Tapa dura

An international bestseller and finalist for the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award, The Age of Reinvention is a suspenseful Gatsbian tale of a famous New York lawyer whose charmed and glamorous life is a sham.

"With a lie you can go very far, but you can never go back." –Anonymous Proverb

Elite Manhattan criminal defense attorney Sam Tahar seems to have it all: fame, fortune, good looks, an enviable marriage to a prominent socialite, and two wonderful children. But his life is a house of cards; everything that he has achieved stems from a single lie he told in a moment of weakness.

Because Sam Tahar isn’t who he pretends to be.

He grew up Samir Tahar, born into a poor Muslim family crammed inside a grimy Paris apartment tower, destined for a life on the margins, until one day he decided destiny would not have its way with him. “He was going to cut through the bars of his social jail cell, even if he had to do it with his teeth.”

Samir clawed his way to law school, where he became fast friends with Jewish student Samuel Baron. The two were inseparable until the alluring Nina, torn between the men, ultimately chose Samuel, the weaker of the two. Determined as ever to make something of himself, Samir left for America, chopped off the last two letters of his name and adopted Samuel’s life story and origins for his own. His former friend remained stuck in a French suburb, a failed, neurotic writer seething at Samir’s triumphs, still bound to an increasingly resentful Nina.

Twenty years later, the three meet again. Now, all their fates hang in the balance as their tangled love triangle collides headlong with the complex realities of life at the start of the twenty-first century. Called “a masterful novel...unquestionably one of the season’s best” (Paris Match) and “a work of great magnitude” (Le Figaro),The Age of Reinvention is an intriguing, vital, darkly humorous tale about the wonderful possibilities and terrible costs of becoming someone else.

Karine Tuil is a playwright and the award-winning author of eight previous novels. She lives in Paris.