French Exit

Finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and an international bestseller, Patrick deWitt’s brilliant and darkly comic novel is now a major motion picture starring Michelle Pfeiffer.

Frances Price ― tart widow, possessive mother, and Upper East Side force of nature ― is in dire straits, beset by scandal and impending bankruptcy. Her adult son Malcolm is no help, mired in a permanent state of arrested development. And then there’s the Price’s aging cat, Small Frank, who Frances believes houses the spirit of her late husband, an infamously immoral litigator and world-class cad whose gruesome tabloid death rendered Frances and Malcolm social outcasts.

Putting penury and pariahdom behind them, the family decides to cut their losses and head for the exit. One ocean voyage later, the curious trio land in their beloved Paris, the City of Light serving as a backdrop not for love or romance, but self-destruction and economic ruin ― to riotous effect.

Brimming with pathos and wit, French Exit is a one-of-a-kind “tragedy of manners,” a riotous send-up of high society, as well as a moving mother and son caper which only Patrick deWitt could conceive and execute. A finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and an international bestseller upon its original publication, French Exit is now a major motion picture starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Lucas Hedges and with a script by Patrick deWitt.

PATRICK DEWITT is the author of the novels The Librarianist (an instant #1 national bestseller and winner of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour), French Exit (an international bestseller and a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize), The Sisters Brothers (winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Leacock Medal for Humour, and a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize), and the critically acclaimed Undermajordomo Minor and Ablutions. Born in British Columbia, he now resides in Portland, Oregon.