Collapse

I often hated my brother, but I have to understand his life.

From ‘one of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers of his generation’ GUARDIAN

An unflinching account of Édouard Louis’s brother’s life and death.

‘France’s biggest literary sensation’ NEW YORK TIMES

Édouard’s brother spends much of his life dreaming. He lives in a poor, working-class world, where he imagines that he will become one of the finest butchers in France, that he will travel, that he will make his fortune, that he will restore cathedrals, that he will earn his father’s love.

But his reality allows none of this. There is no way to escape, no one who can show him how, and everything about him – his drinking, his violence, his behaviour with women and with others – condemns him.

At thirty-eight he is found dead on the floor of his small studio apartment. This book is the story of his collapse.

Translated by Tash Aw

Praise for Collapse

‘A bracing, pulverising book. It burns with white-hot truth’ COLIN WALSH

‘Unites Louis's trademark sociological sharpness with a new and quite terrifying psychological depth. . . He has never been tenderer, more sophisticated, or more fully on form’ NAOISE DOLAN

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

‘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

Praise for Édouard Louis

‘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

‘Édouard Louis is a master of the poetics of juxtaposition, elucidating the hostile and the intimate, the murky and the pure, the vulnerable and the resilient’ YIYUN LI