A Woman’s Battles and Transformations

Penetrating . . .Louis delivers an incisive portrait of the ways oppression and social forces brought chaos to their lives, and how they found freedom through compassion.

Publishers Weekly

Heartbreaking... You suspect this uniquely troubling writer is far from done yet.

Observer

Tash Aw's sensitive translation captures the vividness of Louis's voice... Movingly, the book demonstrates the pain that moving from one social class to another entails.

Times Literary Supplement

Louis's intimate narrative creates a pathway to understanding the complex, symbiotic nature between systems of power...Louis is in service to those overlooked by the privileged and an excellent role model for how men can become better allies to women.

The Brooklyn Rail

Louis' project, at once aesthetic and political, is..."to create a new language for the left", capable of articulating contemporary working-class experience.

New Statesman

The key to Louis's literary appeal is that he engages with complex themes while keeping things relatively simple. His elegant concision [...] ensures that candour never lapses into self-indulgence.

The Spectator

In his incandescent autofiction, Édouard Louis has remade his painful youth as literature...Louis' most hopeful book to date.

Los Angeles Times

Poetic, tender, joyous.

Guardian

A tenderness of observation... translated into English with unobtrusive flair by Tash Aw.

New York Times