Description
Book SynopsisThe major new novel from the international bestselling author Édouard Louis - about social class, transformation, and the perils of leaving the past behind.
One question took centre 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 'the beautiful violence of being torn away', but a profound portrait of a society divided by class, power and inequality.
Trade ReviewOne of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers of his generation… Change serves as a reminder of how lucky we are to have him, a writer who relentlessly chronicles the type of lives that are lived by so many but rendered by so few -- Kieran Goddard * Guardian *
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
The most nuanced and candid portrait of Louis's life yet... In
Change, Louis razes his own psyche with the same unsparing ferocity that he applied to revealing every squalid detail, every act of brutality, every note of despair in
The End of Eddy * Daily Telegraph *
Compelling… Louis is a very good writer and, as evidenced in the self-lacerating elegance of his latest book, getting better all the time. * Observer *
A mesmeric novel. * Daily Mail *
The unsparing examination of poverty and extreme privilege in modern France (and, when you squint your eyes, sort of everywhere else, too); the rendering of an appetite for better, different,
more that can no longer reasonably be satisfied. Here, self-invention is an act of brutal violence with no discernible survivors. -- Marley Marius * British Vogue Best Books of 2024 *
Édouard Louis is a master of the poetics of juxtaposition, elucidating the hostile and the intimate, the murky and the pure, the vulnerable and the resilient, the changeable and the unchangeable of the world, with his brilliant and preternatural intelligence.
Change is a poignant and compelling read! -- Yiyun Li
