After the Crash (Bussi)

Author Bio
• Birth—April 29, 1965
• Where—Louviers, Eure, France
• Education—N/A
• Awards—more than 15 French national, regional and local prizes
• Currently—lives in Normandy, France


Michel Bussi is the celebrated French aiuthor of nearly 10 detective novels, a political commentator, and Professor of Geography at the University of Rouen. After the Crash (2015) is his first book to appear in English.

Career
Bussi began writing in the 1990s. He wrote his first novel, set around the Normandy landings, when he was a young geography lecturer at the University of Rouen, but it was rejected by several publishing houses. He then wrote short stories, but they too were rejected.

Ten years later, inspired by a trip to Rome at the peak of popularity of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and by a centenary edition of Arsene Lupin by Maurice Leblanc, Bussi resumed work on his manuscript. In 2006 he finished his book, Code Lupin, and found an academic publisher. The first manuscript, however, was reworked nine times before publishing. It sold more than 7,000 copies, and in 2010 was serialized over thirty days by the Paris Normandie daily newspaper.

Bussi now publishes a book a year although they can take several years to become popular. Both Mourir sur Seine (2008) and Nympheas Noirs (2011), for example, achieved only modest success at first. But a combination of the paperback editions, serializations, and finally his major bestseller, Un avion Sans Elle, propelled him into the limelight.

Most of his novels are set in Normandy. His local topicality, together with his teaching and research in Normandy, won him the title of Parrain Officiel (official sponsor) during the 2014 Normandy Festival, a regional festival celebrated throughout Normandy and beyond.

According to the Le Figaro/GfK list of bestsellers, Bussi was one of the 10 bestselling French writers of 2013, selling close to half a million books. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/10/2015.)