Joe Dunthorne 
The Adulterants 

For readers of Roddy Doyle, Nick Hornby, and Mark Haddon, The Adulterants is a piercingly funny—and cringingly poignant—take on how hard it is to grow up and how hard it is when you don’t. 

Ray Morris is a tech journalist with a forgettable face, a tiresome manner, a small but dedicated group of friends, and a wife, Garthene, who is pregnant. He is a man who has never been punched above the neck. He has never committed adultery with his actual body. He has never been caught up in a riot, nor arrested, nor tagged by the state, nor become an international hate-figure. Not until the summer of 2011, when discontent is rising on the streets and within his marriage. Ray has noticed none of this. Not yet.



The Adulterants would be a coming-of-age story if its protagonist could only forget that he is thirty-three years old. Throughout a series of escalating catastrophes, our deadpan antihero keeps up a merciless mental commentary on the foibles and failings of those around him, and the vicissitudes of modern urban life: internet trolls, buy-to-let landlords, open marriages, and the threat posed by more sensitive men. But the wonder of 
The Adulterants is how we feel ourselves rooting for Ray even as we acknowledge that he deserves everything he gets.

A propos de l’auteur

Joe Dunthorne’s debut novel, Submarine, won the Curtis Brown prize, was translated into sixteen languages and adapted into an award-winning film by Richard Ayoade. His second novel, Wild Abandon, won the Society of Authors’ Encore Award. A pamphlet of his poems was published by Faber and Faber. His stories and poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Mc Sweeney’s and The London Review of Books.