‘The Anomaly’ had sold over 1 million copies in France and won the distinguished Prix Goncourt prize when it arrived in the US last fall and immediately became a best seller here.  I was thrilled to find that the author is a member of Oulippo, a group of writers, artists, mathematicians, and philosophers who create works of art that are constrained by a concept.  One of the best examples of this constrained writing is George Perec’s full length lipogram novel, ‘A Void’, which is written entirely without the letter ‘e’.

The author is not constrained by any artificial limits in this book which is clever, intriguing, entertaining, well written and structured, and ultimately head-scratchingly confusing.  The story is a real page-turner.  An Air France plane with 243 passengers and crew flies into a huge storm on its approach to New York and emerges damaged but intact.  Except that it is soon being accompanied by two US fighter jets and forced to land at an Air Force base, not JFK.  Thus starts the saga of how the same plane had landed 106 days earlier with the very same cast of passengers and crew.

Le Tellier begins the book by introducing us to several of the 243 passengers with chapter length vignettes from their lives prior to flying from Paris to New York.  We meet a Nigerian rock singer, an abused little girl with a pet toad, a hired assassin, a novelist, and an aging writer with his young girlfriend.  All of these characters later become the focus for the US Government’s Special Ops crew as the government, led by a trump look-alike (“Don’t bother me with details, I’ve seen Star Trek”) struggles to understand how a perfect duplicate of a plane and people showed up 106 days after the original landed.  We meet Macron as France and the rest of the world join in trying to figure out what is happening. When it turns out that a similar event had happened in China some months earlier and had not been shared with the rest of the world, the mystery deepens. Theories abound but the most popular is that some ‘higher being or civilization’ is ‘testing’ us on earth???

Le Tellier is a superb story teller and raises interesting issues of free will, existence, God, etc.  The ending is particularly confusing as the characters struggle to understand their duplicates and wonder what is real and what is virtual.  If you have any interest in sci-fi, this is a sophisticated, very well written book for you.