Emmanuel Carrere · 1986 · global

Emmanuel Carrere's 1986 novel, a vertiginous little masterpiece of paranoia. A man shaves off his moustache expecting his wife to notice; she insists he never had one, and so does everyone else. Fleeing the unravelling of his own reality, he flies on impulse to Hong Kong and loses himself in endless crossings of the harbour. A chilling fable about identity and the fragility of the world we take for granted. The journey is brief, but the ground gives way at every step.

1. 1
   Paris

   A man shaves off his moustache for a joke, and his wife swears he never had one. As everyone he knows insists the same, his grip on reality begins to dissolve.

2. 2
   Hong Kong

   On a sudden, panicked impulse he boards a plane and flies to Hong Kong, a stranger at the far edge of the world.

3. 3
   Kowloon

   There he rides the Star Ferry back and forth across the harbour, over and over, as the last threads of his identity quietly come apart.

4. 4
   Macau

   Agnes finds him in Hong Kong, which she has no way of doing, and he runs a second time - across to Macau by jetfoil, alone in a city he has no business in, wandering it and its outskirts until he decides how to end it.