Serge

$17.00

By Yasmina Reza

Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman

A family's quest to make sense of their shared history. A bittersweet exploration of love, loss, and the chaos of sibling relationships. When family bonds are tested, humor and heartbreak collide.

Paperback • ISBN: 9781632064011
Publication date: Aug 26, 2025

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ABOUT THE BOOK

When adult siblings Serge, Jean, and Nana embark on an unexpected road trip to Auschwitz and Birkenau, they take along one of their daughters and plenty of complicated family history. The solemn journey quickly devolves into a tragicomedy of personal grievances, combative banter, and awkward confrontations.

Acclaimed novelist and playwright Yasmina Reza masterfully portrays the messiness of family life—where love and resentment intertwine, and the weight of shared history looms large. Serge is a richly layered tale that is as reflective as it is humorous—simultaneously a meditation on memory, an exploration of our love and hate for those closest to us, and a testament to Reza’s gift for finding humanity in chaos.

PRAISE FOR Serge:

"While her characters provoke, fight and resent each other, Yasmina Reza delicately leaves traces of the mutual love and shared memories that continue to bind them all together. And it is precisely this tension that constitutes this novel’s strength."

— Alice de Reviers, Albertine

"Here is a book that better resembles a play than a novel: a dramatic subject rooted in history; a disturbing and offbeat treatise; endearing, ridiculous or whimsical characters; lively dialogues. But Serge is also an answer to the famous and very current question: can we laugh at everything?"

— Rodolphe de Saint Hilaire, Culture-Tops

"Can we say that this is one of the funniest texts written in French about a visit to Auschwitz, or is it incongruous? Funny because it is true: it is neither a farce nor a fable. . . . What does it mean to be a family? What does it mean to be Jewish? The novel raises a few existential questions in passing, with great accuracy and dazzling virtuosity."

— Natalie Levisalles, En Attendant Nadeau

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza's work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. Her play Art was the first non-English language play to win a Tony Award; Conversations After a Burial, The Unexpected Man, and Life X 3 have all been award-winning critical and commercial successes internationally; and God of Carnage, which also won a Tony Award, was adapted for film by Roman Polanski. A new play, Bella Figura, premiered in Germany in May 2015. Her fiction includes Hammerklavier, Desolation, and Adam Haberberg. Reza lives in Paris.

About the Translator

Jeffrey Zuckerman is a translator of French, including books by the artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Dardenne brothers; queer writers Jean Genet and Hervé Guibert; and the Mauritian novelists Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Carl de Souza. A graduate of Yale University, he has been a finalist for the TA First Translation Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and recipient of a PEN/Heim translation grant and the French Voices Grand Prize. In 2020 he was named a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.