Lie With Me: 'Stunning and heart-gripping' André Aciman

Product Information

Whenever he mentions this question of the forbidden I will try in vain to show him that he’s wrong. Set in 1984 in rural France, in the small town of Barbezieux, the novel recounts the teenage love affair between the narrator and his schoolmate Thomas Andrieu. [4] Impact and Adaptations [ edit ] We leave the gym as we came in, sneaking ourselves through the window, and return to the biting cold of winter outside.

I didn’t expect Thomas to be there, and my first reaction to seeing him is surprise. I didn’t even know that he was invited (but why on earth would I have been warned? Who would have warned me?). When I saw him the day before, he didn’t say anything about this birthday party (but then again he doesn’t owe me anything; our relationship was founded on this absence of obligation). I didn’t mention anything to him either. Obviously if we knew, one of us wouldn’t have come. The truth is, I never expected to see him at this kind of thing. He is so unsociable and aloof at parties, so out of place in that kind of setting. There’s something off, uncomfortably incongruous, about seeing him here. This is important: he sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become. Nathalie is a year and a half younger than he is. It made sense for a second child to be born so soon after the first one, but he says she doesn’t look anything like him. She takes after their father. She has his light eyes, his strength. Tense, darkly funny and morally complex. I wished Lie With Me wouldn't end.” - Tammy Cohen, author of WHEN SHE WAS BAD A deeply moving depiction of first love, both tender and elegiac. John Boyne, bestselling author of 'A Ladder to the Sky'Sometimes he lets them approach. I’ve already seen him with a select few, usually the pretty ones. Immediately I feel a fleeting stab of jealousy, a sense of impotence. So here they are, in Jake’s home country, with his mother next door (in Antipodean terms) and awaiting the arrival of a new nanny so that Anna can start the new job that Jake’s friend has kindly arranged for her. I have no idea that one day I will write books. It’s an inconceivable hypothesis. If by some extraordinary chance the idea happened to cross my mind, I would have chased it away. The son of a school principal, an imposter? He’s already there when I cross the threshold. He arranged to arrive before me, perhaps to make sure that he wasn’t followed, that we weren’t seen walking in together. Lie With Me is likely Besson’s most successful work so far, garnering international attention and acclaim. He followed up this book with Un personnage de roman (“A Character From A Novel”), which tells the story of Emmanuel Macron’s run for president in France. The Translator

Lie With Me , published in French as Arrête avec tes mensonges in 2017, makes use of the double entendre of its title. It both alludes to the more risque scenes of the book, as well as the fact that the relationship at its center is founded on secrecy and deceit. The story is told by Philippe, who in his last year of high school begins a relationship with another boy, Thomas Andrieu. The bulk of the story takes place in 1984, but it flashes forward later on to 2007 and 2016. He says that he has never done this before. He doesn’t even know how he dared, how it came to him. He hints at all the questions, all the hesitations, denials, and objections he had to overcome, but adds that he had to do it, that he didn’t have a choice. It had become a necessity. The smoke gets in his eyes. He says that he doesn’t know how to deal with it, but there it is. It’s given to me as a child would throw a toy at the feet of his parents. I also don’t know then that I will meet Patrice Chéreau one day and work with him. He will adapt one of my novels, a story about brothers and illness and the body as it approaches death. It will be like a circle closing twenty years later. Aïssaoui, Mohammed (3 May 2017). "Prix Orange du Livre: les cinq finalistes". Le Figaro (in French) . Retrieved 10 September 2023.The uncanny thrill of Philippe Besson's Lie With Me rises up from Molly Ringwald's elegant translation with the intensity of meeting a stranger on a train who tells you a single unforgettable story and then leaves. And his voice haunts me still Alexander Chee, author of 'How to Write an Autobiographical Novel' and 'The Queen of the Night' As I’ve said: at that moment in time, I don’t have much ambition. I know I can accomplish long and prestigious courses of study, I’m very disciplined, deferential even, but I have no idea where it will lead me. I imagine that I will have to climb the mountain pass, since I have the qualities of a climber, but the peaks remain imprecise and uncertain; in the end my future is in a fog and I don’t care about it. And as for the rare seconds scraped together on the playground, or in the hallway, when we’re finally in the same place: total indifference. Worse than coldness. An attentive observer might even discern a certain hostility, a determination to keep his distance. This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable. I’m on the playground with everyone else. It’s recess. I just got out of two hours of philosophy (“Can one assume at the same time the liberty of man and the existence of the unconscious?”), the kind of subject we are told can show up on “the bac,” the French end-of-high-school exam. I’m waiting for my biology class. The cold stings my cheeks. I’m wearing a predominantly blue Nordic sweater. A shapeless sweater that I wear too often.

Few books rise head and shoulders above others in their class. These books touch us in vulnerable places, impact us strongly as we read them and stay in our minds and hearts long after we’ve read them They become the books we will keep in our personal libraries, will re-read and re-read again and we feel and experience rather than just read. I wait for the hallways to empty out, making myself late for the class I’m returning to, and I unfold the piece of paper. There is just a place and a time written on it. Nothing else, not my name, no signature. There is no warmth, no good wishes, just the essential information. The piece of paper can never be used as evidence against him. We have a new date. The critically acclaimed, internationally beloved novel by Philippe Besson—“this year’s Call Me By Your Name” ( Vulture) with raves in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Vanity Fair, Vogue, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Out—about an affair between two teenage boys in 1984 France, translated with subtle beauty and haunting lyricism by the iconic and internationally acclaimed actress and writer Molly Ringwald. And him; he watches what they do. He knows that they find him attractive. Good-looking guys always know it. It’s a calm kind of certainty.If I had not been abandoned by my friends, if he had failed to convince his to leave him behind, this moment would not have taken place. It could have almost never happened. It’s at the end of the town. I’m surprised by the choice of the place, since it’s not at all central, or easily accessible. I think: He must like places away from the crowd. I do not yet understand that he obviously chose it to be out of sight. I am in this state of innocence, this stupidity. If I were used to exercising caution, or had developed the art of not responding to questions—but I barely know anything yet of concealment, of the clandestine. I find it a handsome name, a beautiful identity. I don’t know yet that one day I will write books, that I will invent characters and I will have to name those characters, but I am already sensitive to the sound of identities, to their fluidity. However, I do know that first names can betray a social origin, a context that anchors those who carry them to a particular era.