The End of Eddy: A Novel

About this book

An autobiographical novel 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 Im 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 differentgirlish intellectually precocious and attracted to other men. Already translated into twenty-nine 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 douard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. The resulta critical and popular triumphhas made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation.