Benoit Dutertre is the great-grandson of one of the presidents of France, a rapidly gaining popularity French writer, author of a dozen novels and stories. The work of this author is watched with great interest by Milan Kundera, who considers him one of the brightest representatives of the new generation. Dutertre’s novel “Lover No. 1, or Journey to France” received the Medici Prize in 2001. Benoit Dutertre’s new novel “The Girl and the Cigarette” is a story that took place in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic universe, where everyone, as one, is struggling with smoking. A municipal employee decides to sneak a cigarette in the city hall bathroom. It is known that the most innocent actions are sometimes fraught with dire consequences, but in Dutertre's funny and creepy narrative, the consequences are simply catastrophic.