The Mystery Guest

When the phone rang on a cold November afternoon in 1990, Grgoire Bouillier had no way of knowing that the caller was the woman who had left him, without warning, five years before. And he couldnt have guessed why she was calling: not to say she was sorry, not to explain why shed vanished from his life, but to invite him to a party. A birthday party. For a woman hed never met. Here is the unlikely but true account of how one man got over a broken heart, regained his faith in literature, participated - by mistake - in a work of performance art, threw away his turtlenecks, spent his rent money on a 1964 bordeaux that nobody ever drank, and fell in love again. Named one of the years best books by Slate and the San Francisco Chronicle when it first appeared in English, The Mystery Guest is a darkly hilarious . . . odyssey . . . that wends its loopy way toward yes (O, the Oprah Magazine).