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Monique Escapes

byÉdouard Louis, John Lambert (Translator)

One evening, during a writers’ residency in Athens, Édouard receives a tearful phone call from his mother, Monique. She tells him that the man she lives with in Paris is abusive, inflicting upon her the same drunken behaviour as Édouard’s father, repeating the same cycles of violence, shame and humiliation she fled from before.


Step by step, they plan her escape, celebrating each small victory of Monique’s new beginning. But how do you rebuild your life when you’ve never truly known freedom?


Monique Escapes is an intimate and gripping portrait of a mother fighting for her self-determination, and of the son who becomes her ally. It is a story of reinvention, the price of liberty and the remaking of the relationship between a mother and a son who, despite the weight of their shared history, manage to find each other again.

Louis relentlessly chronicles the type of lives that are lived by so many but rendered by so few...[with] monomaniacal focus on the psychological and physical violence inflicted on the working classes by the structures of neoliberalism… One of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers of his generation.
Guardian on CHANGE

About Édouard Louis

Édouard Louis is the author of The End of Eddy, History of Violence, Who Killed My Father, A Woman's Battles and Transformations and Change, 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.
Details
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • ISBN: 9781529949292
  • Length: 144 pages
  • Price: £7.99
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