The end of Eddy: a novel (First American edition.)

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 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.Already translated into 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, Edouard 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.