The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
Change

Change

A Novel

Summary

The major new novel from the once-in-a-generation author of The End of Eddy

'One of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers of his generation’ Kieran Goddard, Guardian

Change fills me with admiration and inspiration, as well as renewed faith in writing itself’ Maggie Nelson

‘One of the major writers of our time' Garth Greenwell

‘A mesmeric novel’ Daily Mail

Édouard Louis longs for a life beyond the poverty, discrimination and violence in his working-class hometown - so he sets out to study in Amiens, and, later, at 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. Change is at once a personal odyssey, a story of dreams, friendship and the perils of leaving the past behind, and a profound portrait of a society divided by class, inequality and power.

Translated by John Lambert

Reviews

  • One 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

About the author

Édouard Louis

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.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more