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. “ Sensational . . . Tuil is pursuing something sophisticated [with] this high tension plot . . . Aside from the wit and intrigue of this ingenious story, chasing these troubled characters around the wheel of fortune makes the thrashing effects of modern life seem all the more apparent.” ( The Washington Post ) "A grounded, sharp and astonishing novel that immerses us in fear, politics and the cold-blooded terror recounted in today's trending news stories.” ( The Chicago Tribune ) "[J]uicy...entertaining." ( The New York Times ) "Karine Tuil’s astonishing fictional saga… makes you understand the relentless agony of being left out in the cold simply because of who you are. Tuil describes her fully fleshed-out characters with an explosive and original narrative style ." ( The Jerusalem Post ) “Suspenseful . . . [A] Gatsby-esque odyssey laced with provocative observations of prejudice, politics, and sexism. . . . [A] secret lights the fuse on the twisty plot, but where it eventually explodes comes as a complete shock." ( Publishers Weekly (STARRED REVIEW) ) “Karine Tuil – who should be admired for the boldness of her exploration of the thorny issues of 21st-century racial prejudice in France and the United States – plots her story like a pro, the twists and turns that lead to Samir’s downfall so teasingly interwoven that when the penny drops it does so with a thunderous crash.” ( The National (UK) ) “An invigorating addition to every reading list this season… An artistic web of love triangles, dark envy, and endless opportunities, The Age of Reinvention is just as luscious as it is compelling.” ( Popsugar ) Karine Tuil is a playwright and the award-winning author of eight previous novels. She lives in Paris. The Age of Reinvention 1 Let’s begin with his wound. Yes, let’s begin there. The last of the stigmata inflicted during a brutal upbringing that Samir Tahar spent his whole life escaping, it was an inch-long gash on his neck. He’d gone to a plastic surgeon in Times Square who attempted to sand it off with a grinding wheel, but it was too late: he would keep the scar forever as a souvenir, would look at it every morning and remember where he came from, from what place/what violence. Look at it! Touch it! They looked, they touched. The first time was always a shock: the sight of/the contact with that whitish scar which betrayed the fury of its creator, signaled the taste for a power struggle, for contradiction—a form of social brutality that, brought to incandescence, presaged eroticism—a wound that he could hide beneath a scarf, a foulard, or a turtleneck sweater, so that nothing could be seen of it. That day, he was concealing it behind the starched collar of a $300 shirt—purchased in one of those luxury clothing stores that Samuel Baron only ever entered now with the vague hope of stealing from the cash register—and everything about him breathed opulence, complacency, consumerism, a zero-defect design