The Adversary

Emmanuel Carrere investigates Jean-Claude Romand, a Frenchman who sustained an elaborate lie for eighteen years—claiming to be a World Health Organization doctor—before murdering his wife, children and parents when exposure became inevitable. The unsettling book is a sustained meditation on self-deception, the social construction of identity and the vertiginous abyss concealed beneath a perfectly ordinary life.

ISBN 9780747554172 · Metropolitan Books · 2001