Change : A Novel

One question took center stage in my life, it focused all my thoughts and occupied every moment when I was alone with myself: how could I get this revenge, by what means? I tried everything.

Édouard Louis longs for a life beyond the poverty, discrimination, and violence in his working-class hometown—so he sets out for school in Amiens and, later, university in Paris. He sheds the provincial “Eddy” for an elegant new name, determined to eradicate every aspect of his past. He reads incessantly, he dines with aristocrats, he spends nights with millionaires and drug dealers alike. Everything he does is motivated by a single obsession: to become someone else. At once harrowing and profound, Change is not just a personal odyssey, a story of dreams and of “the beautiful violence of being torn away,” but a vividly rendered portrait of a society divided by class, power, and inequality.