[1] A film based on the book was released in December 2011, with Audrey Tautou as the main character.

[4] Growing up in a home with few books and often absent parents, David Foenkinos read and wrote little during his childhood.

At 16, he required emergency surgery as a result of a rare pleural infection and spent several months recuperating in hospital, where he began to devour books, learning to paint and play the guitar.

[5] He studied literature at the Sorbonne and music in a jazz school, eventually becoming a guitar teacher.

[6] After a handful of failed manuscripts, he found his style, and his first novel Inversion de l'idiotie: de l'influence de deux Polonais (“Inversion of idiocy: influenced by two Poles”), though refused by many other publishers, was published by Gallimard in 2002; the book earned him the François-Mauriac literary prize, awarded by the Académie Française.