The Anomaly

By Hervé LeTellier, translated by Adrianna Hunter

Located somewhere between science fiction and philosophy or metaphysics and a high-concept thriller, The Anomaly has been a runaway best seller both in its native France and the US. The premise is that a commercial jet loaded with passengers flies into a wild storm and emerges with the passengers and plane duplicates of themselves, copies of the plane and passengers who arrived nearly four months earlier having gone through a similar storm.

A national crisis, of course, ensues and LeTellier has fun contrasting the reactions on different sides of the Atlantic with broad bits of social and political satire. He also involves a couple of very unlikely mathematicians.

The real strength of the novel, though, lies in the personal stories of certain chosen passengers as they meet not just their doppelgangers, but duplicates of themselves who have either gained our lost 105 days of their very own lives,

The novel is memorable for many reasons, leaving us, the readers, with the task of trying to figure out what happened and why.