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Reading lists

A French election reading list

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Extracts

The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis

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Podcasts

The Vintage Podcast: February podcast

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Features

Édouard Louis on explosive novel The End of Eddy

A Woman’s Battles and Transformations

Édouard Louis is one of the most important literary voices of his generation' Guardian 
 
One day, Édouard Louis finds a photograph of his mother from twenty years ago: a happy young woman, full of hopes and dreams. But growing up, Édouard only knew his mother's sadness - what happened in those years since the photo was taken? Then, at the age of forty-five, Édouard's mother frees herself from this life of oppression, to start a new one in Paris. 
 
A Woman's Battles and Transformations reckons with the cruel systems that govern our lives - and with the possibility of escape. It is a tender portrait of a mother, and an honouring of her self-discovery as she chooses to live on her own terms. 
 
 
'Tash Aw's sensitive translation captures the vividness of Louis's voice... Movingly, the book demonstrates the pain that moving from one social class to another entails' Times Literary Supplement 
 
'A tenderness of observation' New York Times 
 
'Incandescent...Louis's most hopeful book to date' Los Angeles Times 
 
Translated from the French by Tash Aw

Heartbreaking... You suspect this uniquely troubling writer is far from done yet.

Louis' project, at once aesthetic and political, is..."to create a new language for the left", capable of articulating contemporary working-class experience.

Tash Aw's sensitive translation captures the vividness of Louis's voice... Movingly, the book demonstrates the pain that moving from one social class to another entails.

A tenderness of observation... translated into English with unobtrusive flair by Tash Aw.

The key to Louis's literary appeal is that he engages with complex themes while keeping things relatively simple. His elegant concision [...] ensures that candour never lapses into self-indulgence.

Penetrating . . .Louis delivers an incisive portrait of the ways oppression and social forces brought chaos to their lives, and how they found freedom through compassion.

Louis's intimate narrative creates a pathway to understanding the complex, symbiotic nature between systems of power...Louis is in service to those overlooked by the privileged and an excellent role model for how men can become better allies to women.

In his incandescent autofiction, Édouard Louis has remade his painful youth as literature...Louis' most hopeful book to date.

Edouard Louis (Author) Édouard Louis is the author of The End of Eddy, History of Violence, Who Killed My Father and A Woman's Battles and Transformations, and the editor of a book on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, making him one of the most celebrated writers of his generation worldwide. Tash Aw (Translator) Tash Aw is the author of We, the Survivors; The Harmony Silk Factory, which received the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Novel and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; Map of the Invisible World; Five Star Billionaire, also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; and the memoir The Face: Strangers on a Pier.

Édouard Louis is one of the most important literary voices of his generation' Guardian 
 
One day, Édouard Louis finds a photograph of his mother from twenty years ago: a happy young woman, full of hopes and dreams. But growing up, Édouard only knew his mother's sadness - what happened in those years since the photo was taken? Then, at the age of forty-five, Édouard's mother frees herself from this oppression, to start a new life in Paris. 
 
A Woman's Battles and Transformations reckons with the cruel systems that govern our lives - and with the possibility of escape. It is a tender portrait of a mother, and an honouring of her self-discovery as she chooses to live on her own terms. 
 
 
'Tash Aw's sensitive translation captures the vividness of Louis's voice... Movingly, the book demonstrates the pain that moving from one social class to another entails' Times Literary Supplement 
 
'A tenderness of observation' New York Times 
 
'Incandescent...Louis's most hopeful book to date' Los Angeles Times 
 
Translated from the French by Tash Aw

Who Killed My Father

The non-fiction companion to The End of Eddy: a short, powerful personal-political essay addressed to Louis' father

Edouard Louis [is] the vanguard of France’s new generation of political writers

Edouard Louis… speaks with an emotional authenticity and a stylistic confidence that is hard to ignore

This short work tackles the intersections of class, gender and sexuality... Louis gives voice to the way the cruel, crude hegemony of masculinity has essentially destroyed his father’s life, making him “as much a victim of the violence” he inflicted as of the violence he endured

This valuable tale brings emotion to a discussion led by numbers, encouraging us to remember the real human lives affected by policy and political point-scoring

To understand what is happening now in France, or indeed, all over Europe, this is an essential text

[A] small but hugely powerful book… Louis has further enhanced his growing reputation as the head of France's new wave of revolutionary writers

With great clarity, this short autobiography speaks of 21st-century working-class lives tarnished by shame and the erosion of hopes and ambitions. Louis and his father appear to recover from their personal losses of love and joy and family life; but it feels too late and at too great a cost

A masterful work from an underrepresented voice, which reminds us that the political is intrinsically personal

Édouard Louis is the author of The End of Eddy, History of Violence, Who Killed My Father and A Woman's Battles and Transformations, and the editor of a book on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, making him one of the most celebrated writers of his generation worldwide.

Who Killed My Father is the story of a tough guy – the story of the little boy I never was. The story of my father. 
 
‘What a beautiful book’ MAX PORTER 
 
In Who Killed My Father, Édouard Louis explores key moments in his father’s life, and the tenderness and disconnects in their relationship. 
 
Told with the fire of a writer determined on social justice, and with the compassion of a loving son, the book urgently and brilliantly engages with issues surrounding masculinity, class, homophobia, shame and social poverty. 
 
It unflinchingly takes aim at systems that disadvantage those they seek to exclude – those who have their expectations, hopes and passions crushed by a society which gives them little thought. 
 
‘Édouard Louis is the vanguard of France’s new generation of political writers’ 
 Evening Standard

History of Violence

The radical, urgent new novel from the author of The End of Eddy – a personal and powerful story of violence

Louis’s greatest strength as a writer is that he feels things so passionately, sometimes to the point of obsession, but that he also has a philosophical turn of mind that explores, rather than neutralises, his feelings.

[B]oth brave and ambitious in its determination never to let its reader, or its author, escape lightly the damaging realities it describes.

[A] harrowing piece of autofiction… History of Violence is a slim but densely layered novel that begins with raw urgency.

[A] heartbreaking novel…  I find myself captivated by Édouard Louis's books and his raw honesty.

An intense and uncomfortably thrilling book, which uses the harrowing events of that Christmas Eve as a basis for a wider exploration of class, race and individualism... a novel that is unflinching in its examination of class and discrimination.

[Louis] writes with this amazing honesty and fantastically uncensored, brutal, beautiful clarity.

A painful and astonishing book, it tells the story of that night and its aftermath with ruthless poise and clinical precision… With almost superhuman compassion and moral courage, Louis traces the origins of Reda’s suffering by reconstructing his father’s story.

History of Violence…pack[s] total immersion and cool detachment into a single page. As translator, Lorin Stein keeps faith with its rawness — and its refinement.

[A] provocative, incendiary and stunning second book.

Once more, Édouard Louis has given us something unique; a book so direct, shocking and moving it is like holding live fire in one's hands as the pages turn. Like all great writers, he shows us something of the self so that we might better understand something of the world.

In this moving autobiographical novel . . . Louis's visceral story captures the overwhelming emotional impact and complicated shame of surviving sexual assault.

A sharp, lucid meditation on how violence perpetuates itself in communities—by engendering fear, and then cruelty.

** Shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award ** 
 
The radical, urgent new novel from the author of The End of Eddy - a personal and powerful story of violence. 
 
I met Reda on Christmas Eve 2012, at around four in the morning. He approached me in the street, and finally I invited him up to my apartment. He told me the story of his childhood and how his father had come to France, having fled Algeria. 
 
We spent the rest of the night together, talking, laughing. At around 6 o'clock, he pulled out a gun and said he was going to kill me. He insulted me, strangled and raped me. The next day, the medical and legal proceedings began. 
 
History of Violence retraces the story of that night, and looks at immigration, class, racism, desire and the effects of trauma in an attempt to understand a history of violence, its origins, its reasons and its causes. 
 
 'It stays with you' Times 
 
'A heartbreaking novel' John Boyne

The End of Eddy

This searing novel of a childhood in a working-class French town has sparked conversations across the globe about social inequality and sexuality

When new voices come from underrepresented constituencies, there’s always the hope of a new perspective... I can read Edouard Louis and know something of what it means to grow up in extreme poverty in contemporary France

Even in the wake of Knausgaard and Ferrante it is hard to find a literary phenomenon that has swept Europe quite like the autobiographical project of Édouard Louis

An extraordinary autobiographical novel about class, violence and sexuality in France. It’s a vivid, often brutal but immensely touching book that restores my faith in the power of literature

This is the courageous story of an outsider, in equal parts frank, provocative and compelling

Stunning... A startling use of the extremely personal to convey a message that is universally relevant

The real achievement of the book is not its reportage, but its attitude. It is written entirely without self pity – and, astonishingly, without judgment... courageous, necessary and deeply touching

It is a brutal, forceful, gripping read. There is no hipster posing, no ironic distance; its anger and rawness make it refreshing. He has something to say – and it’s worth listening to… I suspect we’ll be hearing more of Edouard Louis. He is that relatively rare thing – a novelist with something to say and a willingness to say it, without holding back

A candid, necessary call against conventional definitions of masculinity and the fear of difference

Extraordinary... In prose that revels in describing pain and deprivation, moments of extreme tenderness surface even in the midst of violence

The End of Eddy portrays a childhood marked by fear and violence... His use of...language...gives it a devastating emotional force. To write the novel is at once an act of solidarity and an act of vengeance.

An intensely autobiographical novel that spares no one...this young French writer has captured a candid, unaffected voice that resonates... Publisher's hype all to often fails to deliver, but not this time

The book's directness about violence, sex, his family, and those in his neighbourhood is stunning. But it is also far more than a just memoir, it is a scathing condemnation of the cycle of poverty and violence inflicted upon those he grew up with, those same people who tormented him for much of his early life

Michael Lucy’s translation conveys both the scorching sorrow and the cool intelligence of a book that – half-misery memoir, half radical tract – finds a voice for so much pain. The scapegoat of Hallencourt has become its spokesman

It’s more than an unflinching autobiography… it’s a sociological study, holding up a mirror to working-class life and the norms of masculinity

Remarkably brave… This is a devastating achievement

A remarkable book which looks at its subject with, in equal parts, revulsion, lust, love and anger. The clarity with which Louis examines the interweaving causes and effects of masculinity, adolescence, shame and community on the working class are unparalleled in anything I’ve read before. It is ultimately the story of growing up as an economic and sexual outsider; a vital piece of work for our time

The End of Eddy is a remarkable book, powerful, frank, moving and, at the same time, carefully crafted and devoid of sentimentality or self-pity. Most importantly, in writing reminiscent of the unflinching gaze of Zola's social novels, The End of Eddy reveals the huge damage done by poverty and ignorance in a society that, for all its affluence, reduces its most vulnerable to a condition of banal horror

The End of Eddy is lean and poignant and masterfully tells the tale of growing up gay, poor, and bullied. No one has told this story as eloquently

Like a cannonball spilled off the side of a ship, Édouard Louis makes straight for the deeps. The End of Eddy is heart-crushing, soul-stabbing, astonishing, exhilarating. Édouard Louis is exactly the kind of writer we need right now: honest, fearless and, yes, tough

Édouard Louis speaks of violence, both social and familial, with tremendous force and feeling. Revelatory, queerly tough, as intellectual as it is impolite, The End of Eddy is a book to shake you up

A bracingly pitiless account of the psychic and physical violence that lies at the root of masculine identity. Louis's remarkably visceral story of growing up queer in working class France quickly transcends its setting precisely because it delivers us into it with such emotional force

In stark, unsentimental prose Louis… unblinkingly documents the violence, masochism and racism of rural France in a book that pulses with power

Edouard has produced a critical study of the conservatism of small communities, and an exploration of how we reconcile our individual nature with what is expected of us

An absorbing story… It’s become food for thought for the masses, a type of which the political elite never approve

A savage account of growing up poor, gay and victimised in rural France.

‘A brilliant novel… courageous, necessary and deeply touching’ Guardian 
 
Édouard Louis grew up in a village in northern France where many live below the poverty line. His bestselling debut novel about life there, The End of Eddy, has sparked debate on social inequality, sexuality and violence. 
 
It is an extraordinary portrait of escaping from an unbearable childhood, inspired by the author’s own. Written with an openness and compassionate intelligence, ultimately, it asks, how can we create our own freedom? 
 
‘A mesmerising story about difference and adolescence’ 
 New York Times 
 
‘Édouard Louis…is that relatively rare thing – a novelist with something to say and a willingness to say it, without holding back’ 
 The Times 
 
‘Louis’ book has become the subject of political discussion in a way that novels rarely do’ 
 Garth Greenwell, New Yorker

Edouard Louis

John Lambert

A Novel

The 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.

Edouard Louis

Change

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