CABIN

Abel Quentin

(Editions de l’observatoire, 480 pages, 2024)

 Longlisted for the 2024 Prix Renaudot et Prix Interallié

Winner of the Nancy Booksellers Prize. German translation rights already granted. 

25 000 copies already sold !

"A must-read" - Emmanuel Carrère

In 1973, four young researchers work day and night under the guidance of UC Berkeley Professor Daniel W. Stoddard, the leading specialist of systems dynamics. They are putting the finishing touches on the report that will change their lives and send shock waves across the world. “Report 21” models the future of our thermo-industrial civilization with the help of IBM System/360. The results are unequivocal: If industrial and population growth do not slow, the world as we know it will collapse during the mid-twentieth-first century.

Each in the team reacts according to their temperament. The American couple, Mildred and Eugene Dundee, step out into the public arena to convince world opinion of the urgency of the moment, optimistically believing that once informed, people will act consequently. The Frenchman, Paul Quérillot, refuses to be the messenger of the Apocalypse. He thinks about his career, dreams of living fast and earning millions, and does not hesitate long before selling his expertise to the highest bidder, a French petroleum company. As for the enigmatic Johannes Gudsonn, the genius Norwegian mathematician, rumor has it that he went mad but no one seems to know for sure. It will take a young journalist commissioned to write a piece for the report’s fifty-year anniversary to track down Gudsonn from a remote Norwegian cabin to rural France.

Ambitious in scope, carried by Abel Quentin’s fluid and corrosive prose, Cabin offers a fierce satire of a world dancing on the edge of the abyss. The various travels of its protagonists, their foibles, moral imperatives, and ambitions depict what it means to live in an anxiety-ridden world threatened by environmental and societal collapse.

Abel Quentin has published two previous acclaimed novels: Soeurs (Éditions de l’Observatoire, 2019; short-listed for the 2019 Prix Goncourt) and Le Voyant d’Étampes (Éditions de l’Observatoire, 2021; winner of the 2021 Prix de Flore and short-listed for the 2021 Prix Goncourt as well as the Prix Renaudot). Cabin is his third novel.