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History of Violence by Édouard Louis
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History of Violence

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Narrator Joseph Kloska

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Translator Lorin Stein
Length 5 hours
Language English
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Random House presents the audiobook edition of History of Violence by Edouard Louis, read by Joseph Kloska.

The radical and urgent new novel from the author of The End of Eddy

I met Reda on Christmas Eve 2012. I was going home after a meal with friends, at around four in the morning. He approached me in the street, and finally I invited him up to my apartment. He told me the story of his childhood and how his father had come to France, having fled Algeria.


We spent the rest of the night together, talking, laughing. At around 6 o'clock, he pulled out a gun and said he was going to kill me. He insulted me, strangled and raped me. The next day, the medical and legal proceedings began.


History of Violence
retraces the story of that night, and looks at immigration, dispossession, racism, desire and the effects of trauma in an attempt to understand, and to outline, a history of violence, its origins, its reasons and its causes.

Édouard Louis is the author of The End of Eddy, History of Violence, Who Killed My Father and A Woman's Battles and Transformations, 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.

Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

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Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

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Reviews

Louis’s greatest strength as a writer is that he feels things so passionately, sometimes to the point of obsession, but that he also has a philosophical turn of mind that explores, rather than neutralises, his feelings. [B]oth brave and ambitious in its determination never to let its reader, or its author, escape lightly the damaging realities it describes. [A] harrowing piece of autofiction… History of Violence is a slim but densely layered novel that begins with raw urgency. [A] heartbreaking novel… I find myself captivated by Édouard Louis's books and his raw honesty. An intense and uncomfortably thrilling book, which uses the harrowing events of that Christmas Eve as a basis for a wider exploration of class, race and individualism... a novel that is unflinching in its examination of class and discrimination. Expand reviews
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