Who Killed My Father - Hardcover

Born Eddy Bellegueule in Hallencourt, France, in 1992, E´DOUARD LOUIS is a novelist and the editor of a scholarly work on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu.

“A short, wrenching, tender-hearted essay addressed to his dad. Louis frames his (always unnamed) father as emblematic, tracing his perpetual humiliation, under which he suffered in turn, back to the cruelty of the state toward the poor, the way they are scapegoated and then forgotten, struggling under policies that are de facto death sentences.”
- David O'Neill, 4Columns

“The title Who Killed My Father bears no question mark because for Louis there's no mystery. Striking.”
- Sam Huber, Bookforum

“A challenge to society’s unfettered praise of individual responsibility and its blindness to systemic injustice. Louis’ barbed prose delivers a warning to the French elite about the poverty and underlying anger of the working classes.”
- Todd Gillespie, Financial Times

“Whatever one’s politics, readers of this impassioned work are likely to be moved by the Louis family’s plight and the love, however strained, between the author and his father.”
- Kirkus

“Who Killed My Father is a political document that uses the force of memoir ― incisive, confessional personal details ― to bolster its argument that Louis’s father’s life (and by extension, his family) was ruined by politics. Compelling.”
- Kevin O'Rourke, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Who Killed My Father is a book that navigates what can’t be said, it addresses liminal spaces; it drifts between present and past tense; it glides between first and second person; it eulogizes a man who is still alive. I can think of few young writers who manage to situate themselves so squarely within their time”
- Malvern Books

“A brief, poetic telling of the myriad ways societal contempt, homophobia, and poverty can kill a man. Louis serves as both raconteur and son, expressing deep and considered empathy for a man whose absence looms large.”
- Martha Anne Toll, NPR

“Louis’s book raises the phantom of the political spectres currently haunting France and shines a light on its array of inequalities.”
- Adam Scovell, Review 31

“A poignant ode.”
- Télérama

“The homecoming recounted in this book, linking the intimate with the political, does not blunt Louis’s message, but sharpens it to a fine point. Between his virtuously bourgeois-boheme reader and his father, he chooses his father. This is not politics as love, but love as politics. A declaration to his father becomes a manifesto.”
- Madison Mainwaring, The Baffler