Yoga

Named a Best Book of 2022 by The Guardian

This is a book about yoga. Or at least, it was.

Emmanuel Carrère is a renowned writer. After decades of emotional upheaval, he has begun to live successfully-he is healthy; he works; he loves. He practices meditation, striving to observe the world without evaluating it. In this state of heightened awareness, he sets out for a ten-day silent retreat in the French heartland, leaving his phone, his books, and his daily life behind. But he's also gathering material for his next book, which he thinks will be a pleasant, useful introduction to yoga.

Four days later, there's a tap on the window: something has happened. Forced to leave the retreat early, he returns to a Paris in crisis. Life is derailed. His city is in turmoil. His work in progress falters. His marriage begins to unravel, as does his entanglement with another woman. He wavers between opposites-self-destruction and self-control, sanity and madness, elation and despair. The story he has told about himself falls away. And still, he continues to live.

This is a book about one man's desire to get better, and to be better. It is laced with doubt and animated by the dangerous interplay of fiction and reality. Loving, humorous, harrowing, and profound, Yoga hurls us toward the outer edges of consciousness, where, finally, we can see things as they really are.

Emmanuel Carrère , born in Paris in 1957, is a novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and film producer. He is the award-winning, internationally renowned author of Kolkhoz , V13 , 97,196 Words , The Kingdom , Limonov , The Mustache , Class Trip , The Adversary (a New York Times Notable Book), My Life as a Russian Novel , and Lives Other Than My Own , which was awarded the Globe de Cristal for Best Novel in 2010. For Limonov, Carrère received the Prix Renaudot and the Prix des Prix in 2011 and the Europese Literatuurprijs in 2013. For V13 , Carrère received the Prix Medicis in 2025.

John Lambert has translated Monique Escapes by Édouard Louis, as well as works by Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Emmanuel Carrère. His translation of Carrère's V13 won the 2024 French-American Foundation's Translation Prize. He lives in Nantes, in northwestern France.