An autobiographical novel from Édouard Louis, hailed as one of the most important voices of his generation—about social class, transformation, and the perils of leaving the past behind.One question took center stage in my life, it focused all of my thoughts and occupied every moment when I was alone with myself: how could I get this revenge, by what means? I tried everything.Édouard Louis longs for a life beyond the poverty, discrimination, and violence in his working-class hometown—so he sets out for school in Amiens, and, later, university in Paris. He sheds the provincial "Eddy" for an elegant new name, determined to eradicate every aspect of his past. He reads incessantly; he dines with aristocrats; he spends nights with millionaires and drug-dealers alike. Everything he does is motivated by a single obsession: to become someone else. At once harrowing and profound, Change is not just a personal odyssey, a story of dreams and of...

A Woman's Battles and Transformations is a portrait of the author's mother by the acclaimed writer of the international bestsellers The End of Eddy and History of Violence.Late one night, Édouard Louis got a call from his forty-five-year-old mother: "I did it. I left your father." Suddenly, she was free.This is the searing and sympathetic story of one woman's liberation: of mothers and sons, of history and heartbreak, of politics and power. It reckons with the cruel systems that govern our lives—and with the possibility of escape. Sharp, short, and fine as a needle, it is a necessary addition to the work of Édouard Louis, "one of France's most widely read and internationally successful novelists" (The New York Times Magazine).

This bracing new nonfiction book by the young superstar E´douard Louis is both a searing j'accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his fatherHighly acclaimed for The End of Eddy, E´douard Louis in Who Killed My Father rips into France's long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French—at the minimum—of negligent homicide. "Racism," he quotes Ruth Gilmore, "is the exposure of certain groups to premature death." And Louis goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father—barely fifty years old, he can hardly walk or breathe: "You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death." It's as simple as that. But hand in hand with searing, specific denunciations are tender passages of a love story between a father and son badly damaged by shame, poverty and homophobia, but...

History of Violence is international bestselling French author Edouard Louis's autobiographical novel about surviving a shocking sexual assault and coping with the post-traumatic stress disorder of its aftermath.On Christmas Eve 2012, in Paris, the novelist Édouard Louis was raped and almost murdered by a man he had just met. This act of violence left Louis shattered; its aftermath made him a stranger to himself and sent him back to the village, the family, and the past he had sworn to leave behind.A bestseller in France—challenged and vindicated in the courts—History of Violence is a short nonfiction novel in the tradition of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, but with the victim as its subject. Moving seamlessly and hypnotically between past and present, between Louis's voice and the voice of an imagined narrator, History of Violence has the exactness of a police report and the searching, unflinching curiosity of...

An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy."Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again . . . Today I'm really gonna be a tough guy." Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different—"girlish," intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men.Already translated into twenty languages, The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. The result—a critical and popular triumph—has made him the most celebrated French writer of...