- Published: 5 September 2019
- ISBN: 9780241987100
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 160
Lie With Me
'Stunning and heart-gripping' André Aciman
- Published: 5 September 2019
- ISBN: 9780241987100
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 160
This gorgeous, aching novel captures all of the fear and freedom of young desire. . . may well be the best gay love story in contemporary fiction. I dare you to read it without crying.
Christopher Bollen, author of 'The Destroyers'
The French Brokeback Mountain
Elle
A timeless love story. Molly Ringwald's translation is as clear and beautiful as the story it depicts. You'll read it in a night, but its exquisite heartbreak will linger.
David Ebershoff, author of 'The Danish Girl'
At first erotic and joyous, ultimately elegiac and haunting, Lie With Me is a deceptively slender book as big as life itself
Rumaan Alam, author of 'That Kind of Mother' and 'Rich and Pretty'
The uncanny thrill of Philippe Besson's Lie With Me rises up from Molly Ringwald's elegant translation with the intensity of meeting a stranger on a train who tells you a single unforgettable story and then leaves. And his voice haunts me still
Alexander Chee, author of 'How to Write an Autobiographical Novel' and 'The Queen of the Night'
Lie With Me is an exquisite whisper that lingers long after you've finished reading it
Kevin Kwan, author of 'Crazy Rich Asians'
In spare yet evocative prose, elegantly translated by Molly Ringwald, Philippe Besson relates the erotic awakening of two adolescent boys in a small French town in the 1980s. Lie With Me captures their world with the grainy poignancy of an old high school yearbook, while movingly conveying the quintessential human dramas of longing, love, and letting go.
Caroline Weber, author of 'Proust's Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-siècle Paris'
This is a gorgeous fever dream of a book. Ringwald's translation does elegant justice to Besson's balance of beauty and despair, and to his interrogations of memory and longing. Lie With Me positively glows in the dark.
Rebecca Makkai, author of 'The Great Believers'
A stunning and heart-gripping tale
André Aciman, author of 'Call Me by Your Name'
A man looks back at his first love, a forbidden homosexual affair during his last year of high school in a small French town in the 1980s. Though a screenwriter and playwright, Mr. Besson does not rely on direct dialogue but reconstructs conversations from a fog of memories in this coming-of-age story. A French best seller likened to "Call Me By Your Name" and "Brokeback Mountain," the novel marks the first English translation by the actress and writer Ms. Ringwald, a longtime Francophile.
Wall Street Journal, The 10 Books You’ll Want to Read This Spring
Molly Ringwald translated this French Call Me By Your Name-esque novel about two teenagers in 1984 Bordeaux as they fall in love in the shadows, leaving one of them to reflect on the relationship many years later
OprahMag.com, 30 of the Best LGBTQ Books in 2019
There's much book-to-filmstar appeal in this moving, well-plotted tale: Elle dubbed it "the French Brokeback Mountain"; there's something of Call Me by Your Name's Elio in Philippe, who lives in the books he reads and writes; and actress and writer Ringwald ably translates.
Booklist
Moving ... Besson's writing and Ringwald's smooth translation provide emotional impact.
Publishers Weekly
Besson is a thoughtful writer who can strike home with vivid imagery. . . [and] deftly translated [by Ringwald].
Booklist
Universally touching
Le Parisien
A bittersweet love story, told from the perspective of a gay man remembering his first romantic affair as a teenager in a small town in the south of France in 1984.
Wall Street Journal
This Year's Call Me by Your Name... While the starring peach of Call Me by Your Name was the perfect metanym for that lush and gauzy tale, Lie With Me unpeels like a springy orange. The boys' relationship is bare but segmented, each encounter entirely isolated from the others, with only a thin membrane to keep all that tart juice from bursting out. . . [A] moving and graceful novel
Vulture
A lovely novel, a painful story of love and loss. . . Lie with Me succeeds as a novel because of Besson's graceful writing, beautifully translated by Ringwald. Besson is a gifted stylist, and he infuses Philippe's story with the right notes of sadness and longing.
NPR
A beautiful, shattering novel about desire and shame, about passionate youth and the regrets of age.
Olivia Laing, bestselling author of CRUDO and THE LONELY CITY