Join us for an evening with Mattia Filice, author of Driver (Mécano, P.O.L, 2024), translated from French by Jacques Houis and published in English by New York Review Books on 21 October 2025.
Driver is a landmark 21st-century novel: a granular portrait of the boredom, drudgery, and minor-key beauty of everyday work. Drawing on nearly two decades as a driver for the French railway, Filice has poured into his novel the kind of obsessive, specialised knowledge which can only emerge from the accumulation of a professional routine—to be exact, 5,475 days, 131,400 hours, 7,884,000 minutes, or 473,040,000 seconds spent on the rails.
Composed of a striking mixture of prose and free-verse, Driver follows its narrator through his apprenticeship, lorded over by a series of meticulous, bureaucratic trainers. The story captures the rhythm of everyday life on the rails—delays, accidents, malfunctions, and shift changes—alongside moments of poetry, camaraderie, and quiet reflection. Through the narrator’s interactions with colleagues Ach, Gaël, and Adama, Filice, detail by tender detail, conveys the effects of the passage of time, and of the continual struggle for dignity and solidarity.
Radical in subject and form, Driver interweaves a dizzying mixture of technical language, jokes, anecdotes, fragments of speech, quotations, and diaristic ruminations as it shifts from verse to prose and back again.
The evening will conclude with a book signing, with copies available for purchase onsite with our partner bookshop, Librairie La Page.
