My thanks to Holden Shepherd who recommended this book to me about four years ago … (it has been on my TBR list for a while!) my only regret is that I didn’t read it sooner. This is a love story like no other, with a shocking and emotional ending that is simultaneously impossibly sad and beautiful. I was reminded of the quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘The years teach much which the days never know.’ During those few intense months, their love is passionate but furtive. Their affair, kept hidden because of the shame surrounding homosexuality at the time, begins in winter but is over by the summer. This story is physically arousing and emotionally affecting poignant, touching, distressing. Lie With Me by Philippe Besson is a bittersweet novella about first love between two teenage boys in rural France in the 1980s. And indeed, early in the book are the prophetic words: ‘He tells me something I did not know: that I will leave.’ This phrase returns to haunt him over the years. Shifting between three years, 1984, 20, we are immersed in the author’s head from the start as he meets Thomas and the two are magnetically drawn to each other despite society’s displeasure.

Full of shame and desire, a sense of duty, sensual and sensuous prose, and intense and devastating themes, Lie With Me lives up to both senses of the title’s meaning. Their affair, kept hidden because of the shame surrounding homosexuality at the time, begins in winter but is over by the summer. An elegiac tale of first, hidden love between two teenage boys who have no chance of a shared future, Lie with Me sold more than a hundred thousand copies in. This passionate and romantic story of a blossoming but impossible love between two young men absolutely broke me. Lie With Me by Philippe Besson is a bittersweet novella about first love between two teenage boys in rural France in the 1980s. Rarely do I read such a beautiful, lyrical, tender, moving and heart-breaking novella as Lie With Me (Penguin 2019) by Philippe Besson, translated from the French in achingly luminous prose by Molly Ringwald.

Lie with me besson