PENGUIN ORANGE SPINES : RETURNING TO REIMS PB – DIDIER ERIBON-MICHAEL LUCEY

" A deeply intelligent and searching book, one that makes you re-consider the narrative of your own life and reframe the story you tell yourself Hilary Mantel A Guardian reader s Best Book of 2018 ""There was a question that had come to trouble me a bit earlier, once I had taken the first steps on this return journey to Reims… Why, when I have had such an intense experience of forms of shame related to class … why had it never occurred to me to take up this problem in a book?"" Returning to Reims is a breathtaking account of one man s return to the town where he grew up after an absence of thirty years. It is a frank, fearlessly personal story of family, memory, identity and time lost. But it is also a sociologist s view of what itmeans to grow up working class and then leave that class; of inequality and shifting political allegiances in an increasingly divided nation. A phenomenon in France and a huge bestseller in Germany, Didier Eribon has written the defining memoir of our times. I was overwhelmed by this book. I felt I was reading the story of my life Edouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy A book about self-invention and belonging Colm Toibin"