History of Violence is international bestselling French author Edouard Louis’s autobiographical novel about surviving a shocking sexual assault and coping with the post-traumatic stress disorder of its aftermath.
On Christmas Eve 2012, in Paris, the novelist Édouard Louis was raped and almost murdered by a man he had just met. This act of violence left Louis shattered; its aftermath made him a stranger to himself and sent him back to the village, the family, and the past he had sworn to leave behind.
A bestseller in France, History of Violence is a short nonfiction novel in the tradition of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, but with the victim as its subject. Moving seamlessly and hypnotically between past and present, between Louis’s voice and the voice of an imagined narrator, History of Violence has the exactness of a police report and the searching, unflinching curiosity of memoir at its best. It records not only the casual racism and homophobia of French society but also their subtle effects on lovers, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives. It represents a great step forward for a young writer whose acuity, skill, and depth are unmatched by any novelist of his generation, in French or English.

History of Violence: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Louis, Édouard

Literary

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy.
“Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again . . . Today I’m really gonna be a tough guy.” Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different―“girlish,” intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men.
Already translated into twenty languages, The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. The result―a critical and popular triumph―has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation.

The End of Eddy: A Novel

Woman's Battles and Transformations

A Woman's Battles and Transformations is a portrait of the author's mother by the acclaimed writer of the international bestsellers The End of Eddy and History of Violence. Late one night, Édouard Louis got a call from his forty-five-year-old mother: "I did it. I left your father." Suddenly, she was free. This is the searing and sympathetic story of one woman's liberation: of mothers and sons, of history and heartbreak, of politics and power. It reckons with the cruel systems that govern our lives--and with the possibility of escape. Sharp, short, and fine as a needle, it is a necessary addition to the work of Édouard Louis, "one of France's most widely read and internationally successful novelists" (The New York Times Magazine).

A Woman's Battles and Transformations

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

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 of 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.

Change: A Novel

This bracing new nonfiction book by the young superstar E´douard Louis is both a searing j’accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his father
This bracing new nonfiction book by the young superstar Édouard Louis is both a searing j’accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his father.
Who Killed My Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French―at the minimum―of negligent homicide.
The author goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father, barely fifty years old, who can hardly walk or breathe:“You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.” It’s as simple as that.
But hand in hand with searing, specific denunciations are tender passages of a love between father and son, once damaged by shame, poverty and homophobia. Yet tenderness reconciles them, even as the state is killing off his father. Louis goes after the French system with bare knuckles but turns to his long-alienated father with open arms: this passionate combination makes Who Killed My Father a heartbreaking book.

Who Killed My Father

Arts & Literature

New Directions

Now in paperback, this bracing book by the young superstar Édouard Louis is both a searing j’accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his father Who Killed My Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French politicians― at the minimum―of negligent homicide. The author goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father, barely fifty years old, who can hardly walk or breathe: “You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.” It’s as simple as that. Hand in hand with searing, specific denunciations are tender passages of a love between father and son, damaged early on by shame, poverty, and homophobia. Yet tenderness reconciles them, even as the state is killing off his father. Louis goes after the French system with bare knuckles but turns to his long-alienated father with open arms: this passionate combination makes Who Killed My Father a heartbreaking book.

An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy.
“Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again . . . Today I’m really gonna be a tough guy.” Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different―“girlish,” intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men.
Already translated into twenty-nine languages, The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. The result―a critical and popular triumph―has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation.

Picador

History of Violence

Picador Paper

A Woman's Battles and Transformations is a portrait of the author's mother by the acclaimed writer of the international bestsellers The End of Eddy and History of Violence. One day, Édouard Louis finds a photograph of his mother from twenty years ago. A picture of a happy young woman full of hopes and dreams. Growing up, Édouard knew only his mother's sadness, as she found herself trapped in the humdrum life of a housewife, and her struggles against the dominant world of men. What happened in those years since the photo was taken? Then, at the age of forty-five, his mother frees herself from this oppression. She leaves her husband and her old life behind to start anew in Paris. A Woman's Battles and Transformations is Édouard Louis's most tender book yet. It reckons with the cruel systems that govern our lives, with politics and power--and with the possibility of escape. It is an exquisite and loving portrait of a mother, and an honoring of her self-discovery and liberation as she chooses to live on her own terms.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Louis, Édouard. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Louis, Édouard

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Louis, Édouard. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

History of Violence: A Novel

The End of Eddy: A Novel

A Woman's Battles and Transformations

Change: A Novel

Who Killed My Father

Who Killed My Father

The End of Eddy: A Novel

History of Violence

The End of Eddy: A Novel

Woman's Battles and Transformations