Change
A Novel
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3.5 • 10 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Louis (The End of Eddy) returns with another scorching autobiographical novel, this time drawing on his efforts to break out of isolation and poverty. Eddy Bellegueule (Louis's birth name) grows up in a rural French village rife with racial tension and violence, where his family often has to beg for food. At 14, a drama teacher encourages him to apply to a lycée in Amiens, 30 kilometers away, and he jumps at the chance. At the new school, he befriends a classmate named Elena, who invites him to meals at her family home. There, Eddy learns about cinema and literature and "how not to eat like a peasant." His "new life" allows Édouard—as he renames himself—to "take revenge on childhood" by striving to become a successful author like his mentor Didier, who encourages him to write. He also gets a leg up from a wealthy older man he meets in a bar, who helps him get into an elite Parisian école and pays to have his teeth fixed. Édouard calls his project of transformation a "permanent obsession," as he regularly feels like an imposter and worries he'll fail at school and have to return home. Having worked as an escort in Amiens and Paris, he expresses a singular view about the trade ("In making love with a man I rejected all the values of my milieu, I became bourgeois"). With frank prose and staggering insights, Louis makes the story of his metamorphosis feel vital and alive. This is irresistible.
