A Woman’s Battles and Transformations

Brought to you by Penguin. Everything started with a photo. To see her free, hurtling fulsomely towards the future, made me think back to the life she shared with my father. Seeing the photo reminded me that those twenty years of devastation were not anything natural but were the result of external forces - society, masculinity, my father - and that things could have been otherwise. One day, Édouard Louis finds a photograph of his mother from twenty years ago. A picture of a happy young woman, full of hopes and dreams. Growing up, Édouard only knew his mother's sadness, as she found herself trapped in the humdrum life of a housewife, and her struggles against the dominant world of men. What happened in those years since the photo was taken? Then, at the age of forty-five, his mother frees herself from this oppression. She leaves her husband and her old life behind, to start a new one in Paris. A Woman's Battles and Transformations is Édouard Louis's most tender book yet. It reckons with the cruel systems that govern our lives, with politics and power - and with the possibility of escape. It is an exquisite and loving portrait of a mother, and an honouring of her self-discovery and liberation as she chooses to live on her own terms. Translated from the French by Tash Aw 'Édouard Louis is one of the most important literary voices of his generation' Guardian © Édouard Louis 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

About the Author :
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 been translated into more than thirty languages, making him one of the most celebrated writers of his generation worldwide. Tash Aw is the author of We, the Survivors; The Harmony Silk Factory, which received the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Novel and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; Map of the Invisible World; Five Star Billionaire, also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; and the memoir The Face: Strangers on a Pier.

Review :
Poetic, tender, joyous. Heartbreaking... You suspect this uniquely troubling writer is far from done yet. Louis' project, at once aesthetic and political, is..."to create a new language for the left", capable of articulating contemporary working-class experience. Tash Aw's sensitive translation captures the vividness of Louis's voice... Movingly, the book demonstrates the pain that moving from one social class to another entails. A tenderness of observation... translated into English with unobtrusive flair by Tash Aw. The key to Louis's literary appeal is that he engages with complex themes while keeping things relatively simple. His elegant concision [...] ensures that candour never lapses into self-indulgence. Penetrating . . .Louis delivers an incisive portrait of the ways oppression and social forces brought chaos to their lives, and how they found freedom through compassion. Louis's intimate narrative creates a pathway to understanding the complex, symbiotic nature between systems of power...Louis is in service to those overlooked by the privileged and an excellent role model for how men can become better allies to women. In his incandescent autofiction, Édouard Louis has remade his painful youth as literature...Louis' most hopeful book to date.