'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

A Guardian reader's Best Book of 2018

"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?"

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 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

Didier Eribon is Professor of Sociology at the University of Amiens. His previous books include the biography Michael Foucault, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, and numerous other books of critical theory. 'Returning to Reims, his acclaimed memoir of going back to his roots, is a bestseller in Europe.

Translated by Michael Lucey.