Excerpt from The End of Eddy by Edouard Louis, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

* * *

In the hallway, the tall boy with red hair and the shorter one with the hunchback were shouting. Insults came one after the other with the blows, and unfailingly I kept silent. Faggot, fag, fairy, cocksucker, punk, pansy, sissy, wimp, girly boy, pussy, bitch, homo, fruit, poof, queer, or homosexual, gayboy. On some occasions we would pass each other on a staircase packed with students, or in some other place, in the schoolyard. They couldn't hit me in front of everyone else, they weren't that stupid, they could have been expelled. An insult would do, just faggot (or something like it). No one looked over, but everyone heard. I'm sure everyone heard it, because I remember the satisfied smiles that would appear on other kids' faces in the schoolyard or the hallway, from the pleasure of hearing the tall redhead or the short hunchback deliver a sentence, saying out loud what everyone else thought in secret, and would whisper as I walked by, and that I would hear Look, it's Bellegueule, the homo.

Excerpted from The End of Eddy by Eddy Bellegueule. Copyright © 2017 by Eddy Bellegueule. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.