History of Violence

A radical new novel from one of international literature's most powerful voices- douard Louis tells his own story of violence to tackle urgent social issues deeply ingrained in society. The radical and urgent new novel from the author of The End of Eddy I met Reda on Christmas Eve 2012. I was going home after a meal with friends, at around four in the morning. He approached me in the street, and finally I invited him up to my apartment. He told me the story of his childhood and how his father had come to France, having fled Algeria. We spent the rest of the night together, talking, laughing. At around 6 o'clock, he pulled out a gun and said he was going to kill me. He insulted me, strangled and raped me. The next day, the medical and legal proceedings began. History of Violence retraces the story of that night, and looks at immigration, dispossession, racism, misery, desire and the effects of trauma in an attempt to understand, and to outline a history of violence, its origins, its reasons and its causes.

About the Author :
douard Louis is the author of two novels and the editor of a book on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian and Freeman's. His first two novels, The End of Eddy and History of Violence, were translated into thirty languages, and have made him one of the most celebrated writers of his generation.

Review :
"Louis’s greatest strength as a writer is that he feels things so passionately, sometimes to the point of obsession, but that he also has a philosophical turn of mind that explores, rather than neutralises, his feelings." "[B]oth brave and ambitious in its determination never to let its reader, or its author, escape lightly the damaging realities it describes." "[A] harrowing piece of autofiction… History of Violence is a slim but densely layered novel that begins with raw urgency." "[A] heartbreaking novel… I find myself captivated by Édouard Louis's books and his raw honesty." "An intense and uncomfortably thrilling book, which uses the harrowing events of that Christmas Eve as a basis for a wider exploration of class, race and individualism... a novel that is unflinching in its examination of class and discrimination."