A Woman's Battles and Transformations

Long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Barrios Book in Translation Prize

Édouard Louis’s bracing and honest memoir of his mother’s liberation—a “poetic, tender, joyous” account (The Guardian).

Late one night, Édouard Louis got a call from his forty-five-year-old mother: “I did it. I left your father.” Suddenly, she was free.

A Woman’s Battles and Transformations is the searing and sympathetic story of one woman’s escape: of mothers and sons, of history and heartbreak, of politics and power. It reckons with the cruel systems that govern our lives—and with the possibility of escape. Sharp, short, and fine as a needle, it is a necessary addition to the work of Édouard Louis, “one of France’s most widely read and internationally successful novelists” (The New York Times Magazine).