Change

Compelling… Louis is a very good writer and, as evidenced in the self-lacerating elegance of his latest book, getting better all the time.

Observer

I feel so lucky to be living and writing at the same time as Édouard Louis. Reading the urgent, unspooling prose of Change – Louis’s latest account of a motley life lived so far – fills me with admiration and inspiration, as well as renewed faith in writing itself, and the value of paying persistent, pellucid attention to our relations, desires, histories, and selves.

Maggie Nelson

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, the changeable and the unchangeable of the world, with his brilliant and preternatural intelligence. Change is a poignant and compelling read!

Yiyun Li

The most nuanced and candid portrait of Louis's life yet... In Change, Louis razes his own psyche with the same unsparing ferocity that he applied to revealing every squalid detail, every act of brutality, every note of despair in The End of Eddy

Daily Telegraph

A mesmeric novel.

Daily Mail

One of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers of his generation… Change serves as a reminder of how lucky we are to have him, a writer who relentlessly chronicles the type of lives that are lived by so many but rendered by so few.

Kieran Goddard, Guardian

The unsparing examination of poverty and extreme privilege in modern France (and, when you squint your eyes, sort of everywhere else, too); the rendering of an appetite for better, different, more that can no longer reasonably be satisfied. Here, self-invention is an act of brutal violence with no discernible survivors.

Marley Marius, British Vogue Best Books of 2024

Édouard Louis is one of the major writers of our time, and Change is a profound novel about self-fashioning and the challenge, the defiance, and the ruthlessness of art. I read it with immense pleasure and admiration.

Garth Greenwell

Elegantly and unobtrusively translated by John Lambert… Change displays exhilaratingly the boldness of invention that underlines the author’s desperation to explain himself

Times Literary Supplement