The Almost Perfect World

7 hrs. 46 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Laurent Gounelle

Narrator Stanislav Fedorchuk

Description

The world where programmer David Lizner lives has split into two. On one side is the highly developed society of the Right Ones: they’re free from diseases, poverty, and doubts; they don’t have to work, never part with their phones, get bonuses if they faithfully follow recommendations from numerous mobile applications, and risk ending up on the sidelines if they stop obeying. Most are content with that life, though whether they are happy is an open question.

On the other side are the Outcasts. Unwilling to accept total technological enslavement and information control, they moved to an island where the Right Ones prefer not to go. David, however, will have to. He must tell a girl named Eva Montoya that her uncle has died—a great sociologist—and obtain her uncle’s last scientific work, which threatens to undermine the foundations of the nearly perfect world where David is so comfortable. But Eva, loving freedom, asks countless uncomfortable questions, and gradually David himself starts to be puzzled. Why, after all, is he required to obediently adapt to other people’s expectations?…

From the very start of his first novels, Laurent Gounelle, a specialist in the psychology of personal development, firmly entered the top five most popular French fiction writers. He is the author of ten books translated into forty languages; his works stand alongside those of Marc Levy and Guillaume Musso. His new novel, “Almost Perfect World,” is a clear, transparent story about what happens when people, for everyday comfort, give their right to choose to authorities or algorithms. Our life belongs only to us. Only we decide what it will be—both in general and in the small details. Let’s not give up our right to decide for ourselves. And may Laurent Gounelle’s new novel inspire us.