Collapse
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 2 Jun 2026
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- 12,99 €
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- Pre-Order
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- 12,99 €
Publisher Description
From “one of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers of his generation” (The Guardian), an unflinching account of Édouard Louis’s brother’s life and death.
Édouard’s brother spent much of his life dreaming. He lived in a poor, working-class world, where he imagined that he would become one of the finest butchers in France, that he would travel, that he would make his fortune, that he would restore cathedrals, and that his father, who had disappeared, would return and love him.
But there was no way to escape, no one who could show him how, and everything about him—his drinking, his violence, his behavior with women and with others—condemned him.
At thirty-eight, after years of failure and depression, he was found dead on the floor of his small studio apartment. This book is the story of his collapse.
Édouard Louis traces the life of a man who was in many ways deplorable: violent, misogynistic, homophobic, brutal. But where might understanding begin, and how far can it extend? In Collapse, Louis pursues every angle for answers—newly consulting writers and psychoanalysts and questioning his siblings, his mother, his brother’s partners, and himself. From an outpouring of memory and pain comes a radical gesture of dignity and forgiveness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Louis (History of Violence) opens this revelatory autofiction, which is being published simultaneously with Monique Escapes, by confessing that he felt nothing upon learning of his heavy-drinking older brother's death at 38. The two brothers hadn't seen each other in nearly 10 years, and the unnamed man's fatal heart attack came as little surprise given his history of substance abuse. Nevertheless, Louis resolves to write the history of his late sibling, a would-be master butcher who was "sick because of his dreams" that went unrealized. The brother's story takes shape after their parents' divorce, when he turns to petty crime. Later, he is accused of rape. Alternately cruel and exploitative toward Louis, whom he once threatened to kill for "speaking badly" about their family, the brother doesn't seem redeemable. But Louis reveals the depths of his compassion and his ability to shape a complex story when he adds the perspective of a woman named Stéphanie who knew his brother. She believed he was overlooked by society, and attempted to help him reform. In the end, Louis determines to make the novel "a rampart against forgetting." It's an earnest and richly inquisitive portrait.
