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Change

A Novel

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Pub Date Mar 05 2024 | Archive Date Apr 05 2024

Description

Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue, BBC, and Hudson Booksellers
A New Yorker Recommended Read of the Year

An autobiographical novel from Édouard Louis, hailed as one of the most important voices of his generation—about social class, transformation, and the perils of leaving the past behind.

One question took center stage in my life, it focused all 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 vividly rendered portrait of a society divided by class, power, and inequality.

Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue, BBC, and Hudson Booksellers
A New Yorker Recommended Read of the Year

An autobiographical novel from Édouard Louis, hailed as one of the most important voices of...


Advance Praise

“A breathless account . . . There’s the bracing directness of Louis’s prose, translated into English by John Lambert; the fitful structure, crammed with self-conscious annotations and swift shifts in form; the unsparing examination of poverty and extreme privilege in modern France; [and] the rendering of an appetite for better, different, more that can no longer reasonably be satisfied. Here, self-invention is an act of brutal violence with no discernable survivors.” —Marley Marius, Vogue (Best Books of 2024 So Far)

“Louis’ storytelling, in Lambert’s deft translation, is clear and intellectually robust but captures a tone of fear and anxiety; what he often calls ‘revenge,’ even on a family that might deserve it, is a corrosive feeling. A sharp chronicle of status climbing and its consequences.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“With frank prose and staggering insights, Louis makes the story of his metamorphosis feel vital and alive. This is irresistible.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“I feel so lucky to be living and writing at the same time as Édouard Louis. Reading the urgent, unspooling prose of Change—Louis’s latest account of a motley life lived so far—fills me with admiration and inspiration, as well as renewed faith in writing itself, and the value of paying persistent, pellucid attention to our relations, desires, histories, and selves.” —Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom

“Édouard Louis is a master in the poetics of juxtaposition, elucidating the hostile and the intimate, the murky and the pure, the vulnerable and the resilient, the changeable and unchangeable of the world with his brilliant and preternatural intelligence. Change is a poignant and compelling read!” —Yiyun Li, author of Wednesday’s Child

“A breathless account . . . There’s the bracing directness of Louis’s prose, translated into English by John Lambert; the fitful structure, crammed with self-conscious annotations and swift shifts in...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780374606800
PRICE $27.00 (USD)
PAGES 256

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