In a vivid, tender and uncompromising novel of male violence and destruction, once-in-a-generation writer douard Louis looks back on the life and death of his deeply troubled older brother douard's brother spends much of his life dreaming. He lives in a poor, working-class world, where he imagines that he will become one of the finest butchers in France, that he will travel, that he will make his fortune, that he will restore cathedrals, that he will earn his father's love. But his reality allows none of this. There is no way to escape, no one who can show him how, and everything about him - his drinking, his violence, his behaviour with women and with others - condemns him. At thirty-eight he is found dead on the floor of his small studio apartment. This book is the story of his collapse.

Details

ISBN13: 9781787305038
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 208
Edition:
Publication Date: 16 Jun 2026
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Publication City, Country: United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 22.4(H)x14.4(L)x2.3(W)318
Weight (gm): 318

Author Biography

douard Louis (Author) douard Louis is the author of The End of Eddy, History of Violence, Who Killed My Father, A Woman's Battles and Transformations, Change, Monique Escapes and Collapse, and the editor of a book on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, making him one of the most celebrated writers of his generation worldwide. Tash Aw (Translator) Tash Aw was born in Taiwan and is the author of five novels, three of which have been longlisted for the Booker Prize including his most recent novel, The South. His work has won the Whitbread First Novel Award, a Commonwealth Writers' Prize and an O. Henry Award, and has been translated into over twenty languages. His translation of douard Louis' A Woman's Battles and Transformations was shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize.

Reviews

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
Spare, raw - and quite unforgettably moving. Édouard Louis is someone who makes writing matter -- Neil Bartlett
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
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 *
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 *