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 it means 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.