Collapse

Collapse takes the form of a metaphysical inquest into the brother’s decline… Read in tandem with Monique Escapes, Louis’s latest reveals itself as the dark half of an equation that also has a more hopeful side * Guardian *
The book also reconfigures autobiographical writing... Collapse treats language not as a stable medium of representation, but as a form of pressure, often political, applied to lived experience. The result is neither elegy nor revenge narrative, but a sustained test of what language can and cannot hold together, and of what attention, under sufficient intensity, might finally release * Irish Times *
Tash Aw’s translation underlines Louis’s pitiless lucidity: this is a very different read from the breezier, more sentimental accounts that British working-class intellectuals have tended to give of such journeys... The tragic situation that the novel explores is material and intractable: it is a tragedy of sociology * Literary Review *
What Édouard Louis has to say is so urgent that I buy all his books as soon as they're out in French. I am so glad that English-speakers can now access his latest departure through Tash Aw's new translation. COLLAPSE unites Louis's trademark sociological sharpness with a new and quite terrifying psychological depth, giving us a life at once overdetermined and touched by something darker, more elusive. He has never been tenderer, more sophisticated, or more fully on form. -- Naoise Dolan
Édouard Louis surely belongs to that vital group of writers, amongst the likes of Cusk, Rankine and Ernaux, who have revitalised and reinvented their own form in a relentless pursuit of the truth -- Andrew McMillan
Full of writing that is both rigorously controlled and profoundly shaken, Collapse is a bracing, pulverising book. It burns with white-hot truth, the sort that illuminates even as it incinerates -- Colin Walsh
Spare, raw - and quite unforgettably moving. Édouard Louis is someone who makes writing matter -- Neil Bartlett