City of Rats

The Holy Mountain meets Ratatouille in this X-rated fable by French provocateur CopiLife isnt easy for a Parisian rat. But Gouri is getting by: with his best friend Rak, hes got a small business selling worms to pigeons, a cozy bachelor nest at the local florist, anas spring blooms in the City of Lightsa budding love interest. But after a double date goes horribly wrong, Gouri and Rak, along with the royal Rat Courtthe princesses Iris and Catarina, and their hilariously unpredictable mother, the Queen of Ratsfind themselves adrift on the Seine, accessories after the fact to a double homicide, using their new ally, a small human child, as a life raft. From there, the hijinks metastasize. French police collar the gang along with Mimile, a sadistic murderer who never remembers his crimes. But having escaped lock-up (from the cell they'd been tossed into with their arch-enemies, a snake and a terrier), they pay a visit to the God of Man (a homeless recluse hiding out in the Sainte-Chapelle), but then the giant Rat Devil makes his appearance, full of fiery flatulence and threatening cataclysmTold in a series of letters purportedly written in rat language and posted from Gouri to his former master, City of Rats is the second novel by French-Argentine exile, novelist, cartoonist, playwright, actor, and queer provocateur Copi to be translated into English and perhaps his most madcap work, an X-rated fable where his high-velocity prose smashes through societal taboosmoral, sexual, or otherwiselike a bullet train hitting a glass house. Whimsical, smutty, and surprisingly profound, City of Rats will leave no reader unscathed, and every reader awestruck.