The End of Eddy - Paperback

by Édouard Louis (Author), Michael Lucey (Translator)

The celebrated debut novel from Édouard Louis: the "equal parts frank, provocative and compelling" (Financial Times) coming-of-age story about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy.

"Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again . . . Today I'm really gonna be a tough guy." Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different--"girlish," intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men.

Translated into more than twenty languages, The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. The result--a critical and popular triumph--has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation.

Author Biography

Édouard Louis is the author of The End of Eddy, History of Violence, Who Killed My Father, A Woman's Battles and Transformations, and Change, 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 books have been translated into thirty languages and have made him one of the most celebrated writers of his generation worldwide. He lives in Paris.

Michael Lucey is a professor of French literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust; The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality; and Someone: The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities, from Colette to Hervé Guibert; and has translated Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon.