First love is always such a pivotal moment in people's lives. You become obsessed, it takes over your mind and your body. You move from innocence and unknowing to a new found knowledge, and this book just perfectly encapsulates this in as little as 150 pages. I honestly couldn't put this book down. It all starts when our narrator, Philippe, sees a man that resembles his first love and he is automatically transported back to the summer of 1984 and to this magical relationship that defines his whole life and his writing career. Besson's prose and Molly Ringwald's (!) translation is lyrical, moving and beautiful. in 150 pages it talks openly about homophobia, class divide, fear and shame. However, pain is such an important theme. Pain of not being able to live your true self and explain how you really feel and the consequences of such. The last paragraph gave me goosebumps. A powerful novel, one that will stick with me for a long, long time. I highly recommend. Thank you so much to Penguin for sending me an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This will no doubt get lots of comparisons to Call Me By Your Name, but to my mind this is a better book. Most of the story takes place when the narrator, who later becomes a successful novelist, is in his final year of school in a rural town in France, when he suddenly finds himself in a secret relationship with another boy from his school. This being the 1980s, neither wants anyone to find out, and their meetings are intense and almost furtive, yet achingly romantic. The novel is both literary and easy to read, and the translation by Molly Ringwald makes it almost seem as though it was written in English, while at the same time having an unmistakeable Gallic feel about it. It is a short novel, which helps as it is hard to put down.

I read this in one sitting. This is a beautiful novella that centres around the love affair of two teenage boys. Although there is little plot to this story, you’ll find few novels that deal so well with the difficulty of being young, gay and having to keep that a secret. It’s an incredibly powerful novel that felt like it had been tailor made for me as a reader.

Beautifully evocative of time, place and being in love for the first time, Lie With Me is one of the best short novels I’ve read in a long while. I received an advance copy from the publisher in return for an honest review. The narrator, a fifty-something author, unsettled by an encounter at a hotel, remembers being 17 and falling in love with Thomas, a fellow high school student in a small town in France in 1984. Their relationship is brief and kept secret because of societal norms and expectations. It affects the rest of their lives in different ways, elegiac and tragic. It also affected me as a reader, both immersing me completely in the narrative and the mood and prompting my own recollections. It is a wonderful book to read in one sitting. What I really loved about Lie With Me is its ambiguity. There are enough hints throughout to make you wonder whether this is a work of fiction or a memoir. The narrator tells you that he is an accomplished liar in one moment and in the next highlights the clarity with which he remembers a look or a feeling nearly forty years later. Looking up Philippe Besson after finishing, I came across a recent short interview in The New Yorker where he says “I wanted to write a sadness.” And there is great sadness, judgemental society, homophobia, repression, loss of innocence and love. Lie With Me will invite comparisons with Call Me By Your Name, which I haven’t read, only seen the film but, together with the fact that Molly Ringwald translated it, I hope this will lead to a wide readership and further translations of Besson’s novels into English.

I read the description and saw the writer review by Andre Aciman, and simply could not resist. Many writers replicate the feelings and actions of first loves and heartbreaks, whilst Besson makes the reader relive their own whilst witnessing his character's emotions. I was swept into the narrative and could not stop until I finished the entire novella. Ringwald's translation is wonderful and does not interrupt the flow of Besson's narrative and truly allows love to be universal. You are transported into Besson's 1984 landscape and the love that blossoms there. Besson manages to fit a lifetime of loving someone into 150 pages without rushing or stretching any precious moments. Besson also discusses the issues of homophobia, class divides, and shame which didn't take away from his loving prose but enhanced it and made it so much more real. So real that you can feel the love and pain of each character that it sticks with you, and it has truly stuck with me. The last few pages left me in tears and I will never forget this book. I would recommend this to anyone who loved Aciman's 'Call Me By Your Name' because they will be enchanted by Besson's writing. *I received a free copy from Penguin and have written a honest review in return.