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A Novel
by Brigitte Giraud
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.
Dublin Literary Awards 2026 longlist
The shortlist has been announced: Live Fast by Brigitte Giraud, an autobiographical novel about the death of her husband in a motorcycle crash, won the Prix Goncourt and was translated by Cory Stockwell. The judg...
-Anne_Glasgow
"A gripping novel about grief and loss...Written with forensic precision and journalistic detail, Giraud's elegiac novel is about the questions that haunt us no matter how much we may try to rid ourselves of them." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"An exemplary work of autofiction...An indelible tableau of grief." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"...Literary bargaining par excellence. Even knowing the crushing truth, we read fast, hoping the narrator can identify precisely which butterfly's wing to catch in midair and change her whole story." —Booklist
"An autobiographical novel of great formal and emotional urgency... beneath the 'if only' ache, there is a wild desire to know. Even if the narrator could undo all the accidents that preceded her husband's...a vexing mystery would remain: What possessed a husband and father, in early middle age, to ride to work that day on something portentously called a Fireblade? ... Alongside its agonized desire to undo time and story, Live Fast reflects on where exactly our individual desires arrive from." —New York Times
"An incandescent meditation on love and grief." —People
"Live Fast is a small, crushing masterpiece of grief. Giraud does what the best autobiographical writers have always done: Through the vista of her personal calamity, she incites you to apprehend your own world with a bursting freshness you didn't know you needed." —Washington Post
This information about Live Fast was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Brigitte Giraud is a French writer and novelist and the author of fourteen books. She received the 2022 Prix Goncourt for Live Fast, which was also a big bestseller in France. Live Fast is her first book to be published in English.
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