A bestseller throughout Europe, THE EXCEPTION is a gripping dissection of the nature of evil and of the paranoia and obsessions that drive ordinary people to commit unthinkable acts.
Four women work together for a small nonprofit in Copenhagen that disseminates information on genocide. When two of them receive death threats, they immediately believe that they are being stalked by Mirko Zigic, a Serbian torturer and war criminal, whom they have recently profiled in their articles.
As the tensions mount among the women, their suspicions turn away from Zigic and toward each other. The threats increase and soon the office becomes a battlefield in which each of the women’s move is suspect. Their obsession turns into a witch hunt as they resort to bullying and victimization.
Yet these are people who daily analyze cases of appalling cruelty on a worldwide scale, and who are intimate with the psychology of evil. The cruelty which the women have described from a safe distance is now revealed in their own world. They discover that none of them is exactly the person she seems to be. And then they learn that Interpol has traced Mirko Zigic to Denmark.
THE EXCEPTION is a unique and intelligent thriller, heralding Christian Jungersen as a gifted storyteller and keen observer of the human psyche.
Author: Christian Jungersen
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Customer Reviews
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Human chameleons
Highly recommended! The Exception is a novel of ideas, embedded inside a mystery. The mystery part works reasonably well, while the ideas will stay with you long after you've finished reading the book. Just how adaptable are we humans? The novel makes the case that most of us will adjust to fit our environment. If we work in an office snake pit, we'll become vipers. If we work in a professional, supportive environment, we'll tend to be exemplary co-workers. In a violent totalitarian state, most of us will join right in. It really makes one wonder about the effects of hate-filled right wing talk radio in our society today.... This book is a must read.
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astounding
I bought The Exception on a whim after seeing a positive review of it in the New Yorker this past summer, and it turned out to be possibly the best contemporary novel I've read in the last couple of years; I read the last 200 pp in a day. The prose is clean, spare, taut, the characters well drawn. The use of the Danish Center for Information on Genocide is fantastic--the novel is presented as a thriller, and it is in a way, but really it's a close examination of office politics through a masterful use of multiple points of view. I realize that description doesn't sound all that thrilling in itself, and I actually wasn't sure Jungersen would be able to adequately connect the meditations on the horrors of genocide (represented in the book through a number of DCIG articles, which appear in their entirety) with the petty gossip, backbiting, and bullying that occurs in a contained social space like an office, but the results are positively chilling and thoroughly thought-provoking. With the threatening e-mails, it's technically a whodunit, but really, whodunit is not the point. Really, it's about the darkest corners of human nature, and it's unflinching. Highly recommended.
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Insightful
It has applications from micro to macro relationships. Very well written. Very useful fiction.
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