Returning to Reims

'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... Didier Eribon understands how deep the roots of inequality go' Hilary Mantel

A brilliant little book...a touching memoir of sexual awakening, and a gallery of philosophical ideas and characters' Observer

'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

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 it means 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.