The Frog

John Hawkes's amazing new tale opens as a French child, asleep beside a lily pond shortly before the First World War, swallows a frog. Mysteriously, the creature survives within him - a companion throughout a life filled with physical and psychological pain but also with a strange, frog-given, exhilarating power over others. An Aesopian fable? An ironic children's story? The Frog goes far beyond these, as the adventures of Pascal, the misanthropic victim, and Armand, the tyrannical frog, move between a chateau, a mental institution, and a brothel. Soon The Frog becomes a mock philosophical treatise on the culinary arts, the limits of belief, the sinister appeal of illness, and - as the frog usurps even Pascal's sexuality - eroticism. This brilliantly styled parable of violence and illusion explores with aching poignancy the very qualities that make us human.