The Birthday Party - Tapa blanda

Knopf Canada is proud to welcome an internationally acclaimed, award-winning writer with his brilliant novel that tells the story of one of world’s richest and most infamous tycoons.

As dawn breaks on a small island late in the summer of 1975, a tycoon wakes up to oversee the final preparations for his daughter’s birthday party. Finding out that she is pregnant by someone he does not approve of, he tries to persuade her to end the pregnancy: his private doctor – and oldest friend – is standing by to perform the procedure. Among the other guests is the tycoon’s ambitious biographer. The story intersperses the riveting events that unfold during the day of the party with the tycoon’s rise to wealth and fame, from childhood in Asia Minor to old age, via Buenos Aires, New York, London and Paris, and the attempts of his young biographer to bring his subject’s true personality to light.

The Birthday Party is at once fascinating, revealing and hilarious – a gripping novel that comments upon the art of biography and the invention of a human life.
From the Hardcover edition.

Panos Karnezis is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Small Infamies and The Maze. Born in Greece, he moved to England in 1992 to study engineering, and worked in industry before he started to write. He was awarded an M.A. in creative writing by the University of East Anglia. He lives in London.
From the Hardcover edition.