Returning to Reims (Penguin Books)

'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' - Hilary Mantel "There was a question that had come to trouble me a bit earlier, once I had taken the first steps on this return journey to Reims...

Why, when I have had such an intense experience of forms of shame related to class... Why had it never occurred to me to take up this problem in a book$476" 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 itmeans 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. 'I was overwhelmed aby this book.