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Book Cover for: Change, Édouard Louis

Change

Édouard Louis

Reader Score

87%

87% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Good

Based on 8 reviews on

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Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Vogue, and BBC

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 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 "the beautiful violence of being torn away," but a vividly rendered portrait of a society divided by class, power, and inequality.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Publish Date: Mar 5th, 2024
  • Pages: 256
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.40in - 1.10in - 0.80lb
  • EAN: 9780374606800
  • Categories: LiteraryLGBTQ+ - GayBiographical

About the Author

Louis, Édouard: - Édouard Louis is the author of The End of Eddy, History of Violence, and Who Killed My Father, and the editor of a book on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Freeman's. His books have been translated into thirty languages and have made him one of the most celebrated writers of his generation worldwide.
Lambert, John: - John Lambert has translated Monsieur, Reticence, and Self-Portrait Abroad by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, as well as Emmanuel Carrère's Limonov. He lives in Nantes with his wife and three children.

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

Advance Praise

"With frank prose and staggering insights, Louis makes the story of his metamorphosis feel vital and alive. This is irresistible."
--Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

"Édouard Louis is a master in the poetics of juxtaposition, elucidating the hostile and the intimate, the murky and the pure, the vulnerable and the resilient, the changeable and unchangeable of the world with his brilliant and preternatural intelligence. Change is a poignant and compelling read!"
--Yiyun Li, author of Wednesday's Child

"I feel so lucky to be living and writing at the same time as Édouard Louis. Reading the urgent, unspooling prose of Change--Louis's latest account of a motley life lived so far--fills me with admiration and inspiration, as well as renewed faith in writing itself, and the value of paying persistent, pellucid attention to our relations, desires, histories, and selves."
--Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom