Live Fast

A Novel

Winner of the Prix Goncourt

A powerful autobiographical novel of loss, the incandescent love that remains, and the small decisions that define the course of fate

Paced and structured with the inevitable suspense of a countdown, Brigitte Giraud’s tense and haunting novel follows one woman’s quest to comprehend the motorcycle accident that took the life of her partner Claude at age 41.

The narrator of Live Fast recounts the chain of events that led up to the fateful accident, tracing the tiny, maddening twists of fate that might have prevented its tragic outcome. Each chapter asks the rhetorical question, “what if,” departing from an image or memory from early years in Algeria during the war, to moving to the suburbs of Lyon, buying and renovating a home where they could “put down their suitcase for a whole life.” A sensitive elegy to her husband and a subtle, precise vision of a lasting love, Live Fast is a moving and electrifying portrait of two people caught up in the mundane activities of life, forgetting that living itself can be dangerous.

I expected more

Being that I lost my husband in a motorcycle accident I looked to this book to connected with the author on our shared tragedies of losing our husbands in the same way. To say this as nice as possible, I was bored. I wanted emotion and grief and the pain I feel that makes me wish I was dead too, but all I got was the boring game of what ifs.