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  • Published: 22 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529949292
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144

Monique Escapes




The blazing new book from once-in-a-generation writer, Édouard Louis, whose apartment offers his mother an escape route from an abusive partner, and a new outlook for them both once she moves in.

Monique Escapes opens with a telephone call between Édouard Louis and his mother, who reveals that her partner is an alcoholic and emotionally abusive. Her sadness and fear distresses Édouard, who is in Athens, although his vacant apartment immediately offers her somewhere to stay - and an escape route.

Together, mother and son plot her next steps in what becomes a meditation on the price of liberty, the challenges involved in change, and the necessity of remaking their own relationship even as they work to free her from cycles of abuse. It is a work of remarkable emotional directness and a fascinating reflection on the interplay between life and art - and ultimately the story of an older women's reinvention as she starts a new life.

  • Published: 22 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529949292
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144

About the author

Edouard Louis

Édouard Louis is the author of two novels and the editor of a book on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian and Freeman’s. His first two novels, The End of Eddy and History of Violence, were translated into thirty languages, and have made him one of the most celebrated writers of his generation.

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Praise for Monique Escapes

Louis relentlessly chronicles the type of lives that are lived by so many but rendered by so few...[with] monomaniacal focus on the psychological and physical violence inflicted on the working classes by the structures of neoliberalism… One of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers of his generation.

Guardian on CHANGE
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