Born in Senegal in 1957, Marc Dugain is the author of numerous successful novels. His novel The Officers’ Ward recounts his grandfather’s experiences in World War I and was made into a 2001 film of the same name.
Al Kenner, the protagonist of the French novelist Marc Dugain’s eighth novel, is a quiet teenager who is almost seven feet tall and has an IQ that rivals that of Albert Einstein. He lives with his grandmother, an illustrator of children’s books who constantly harangues...
— Sep 8 2014
A work of fiction closely based on the life story of a real, living person is a strange thing. The intellectual French writer Marc Dugain tries to explain what he is doing in The Avenue of the Giants with a postscript: “To put a real person into a novel is to betray...
— Jul 2 2014
The interview at the French Institute could have been so different. I’d diligently researched my interviewee, French bestseller, Marc Dugain, in English and French sources. (French dictionary by my side.) I discovered he had been a very successful financier. So successful...
— Jun 27 2014
Marc Dugain’s The Avenue of the Giants (Europa Editions, €15.75) offers another unusual take on a genre tradition, that of the sociopathic serial killer. Set in California in the late 1960s, and based on the life of Ed Kemper, aka the Co-Ed Killer (whom Dugain acknowledges...
— Jun 21 2014
Avenue of the Giants follows Al Kenner as he progresses from antisocial adolescent to full-fledged serial killer in the turbulent ‘60s and ‘70s. A giant at over 7 feet tall with an IQ higher than Einstein’s, Al was never ordinary. His life is tainted by his parents’...
— May 27 2014
In the mid-1960s, a teenager named Edmund Kemper murdered his grandparents. After spending several years in a state hospital, he was released and almost immediately began a killing spree that took the lives of several young women. In this extremely compelling novel, French...