Blackwell’s Manchester are absolutely thrilled to be welcoming Édouard Louis to the shop for the Manchester launch of CHANGE, his stunning new novel about social class, transformation, and the perils of leaving the past behind. Édouard will be in conversation with Helen Mort.

Doors: 6.30, starts: 6.45

Tickets are £3.00 or free when ordering a copy of the book. CHANGE will also be available to purchase on the night and Édouard will be signing copies after the talk. If you would like a signed copy but cannot make the event, please contact us on 0161 274 3331 or manchester@blackwell.co.uk and we can arrange this for you.

About the book:

One question took centre stage in my life, it focused all of 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 profound portrait of a society divided by class, power and inequality.

About the author:

Édouard Louis is the author of The End of Eddy, History of Violence, Who Killed My Father and A Woman’s Battles and Transformations and the editor of a book on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. His work has been translated into thirty languages, making him one of the most celebrated writers of his generation worldwide.