Change: A Novel

Description

The major new novel from the internationally bestselling author Édouard Louis - about social class, transformation, and the perils of leaving the past behind.

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

‘I feel so lucky to be living and writing at the same time as Édouard Louis’ 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 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.

Translated by John Lambert