Collapse

The book also reconfigures autobiographical writing... Collapse treats language not as a stable medium of representation, but as a form of pressure, often political, applied to lived experience. The result is neither elegy nor revenge narrative, but a sustained test of what language can and cannot hold together, and of what attention, under sufficient intensity, might finally release

Irish Times

A powerful translation… Collapse is dark, bitter, ragged and a triumph

New Statesman

Tash Aw’s translation underlines Louis’s pitiless lucidity: this is a very different read from the breezier, more sentimental accounts that British working-class intellectuals have tended to give of such journeys... The tragic situation that the novel explores is material and intractable: it is a tragedy of sociology

Literary Review

What Édouard Louis has to say is so urgent that I buy all his books as soon as they're out in French. I am so glad that English-speakers can now access his latest departure through Tash Aw's new translation. COLLAPSE unites Louis's trademark sociological sharpness with a new and quite terrifying psychological depth, giving us a life at once overdetermined and touched by something darker, more elusive. He has never been tenderer, more sophisticated, or more fully on form.

Naoise Dolan

Édouard Louis surely belongs to that vital group of writers, amongst the likes of Cusk, Rankine and Ernaux, who have revitalised and reinvented their own form in a relentless pursuit of the truth

Andrew McMillan

Full of writing that is both rigorously controlled and profoundly shaken, Collapse is a bracing, pulverising book. It burns with white-hot truth, the sort that illuminates even as it incinerates

Colin Walsh

Spare, raw - and quite unforgettably moving. Édouard Louis is someone who makes writing matter

Neil Bartlett