With the same élan and wit that inform her internationally acclaimed and award-winning plays, Yasmina Reza’s second novel, Adam Haberberg, revels in the tragicomedy of one man’s midlife crisis.

While slumped on a park bench in Paris, a man is suddenly hailed by an old female classmate whom he has not seen since high school. The poor guy is, of course, a writer. Morose, panicked about his health, preoccupied with his marriage miseries and the fiasco of his recent book launch, he finds himself stranded in the desert of male middle age. And now there’s the strange business of this woman, who may or may not still be in love with him. Somehow he finds himself riding in her Jeep, riding to her place, not for any of the sensational reasons you might imagine, but because he sort of got stuck in a conversation without any chance of escape. Now he has to find his way out—and home.

A bitingly funny, lethally wise portrait of a hapless nonhero’s big adventure.