Live Fast (Prix Goncourt Winner)

by Brigitte Giraud, Cory Stockwell (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063346734
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/24/2026
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

"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 Fastreflects 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

"Haunting... Giraud gives all this what-iffing a lucidity that might feel forensic except for one big thing. It's not cold-blooded. In Cory Stockwell's fine translation, Live Fast takes what could seem like an intellectual exercise, a strange sort of catechism, and slowly, touchingly infuses it with emotion... this is one of those rare books that works in two directions. It pulls you completely into its reality — believe me, it's a page turner — but also sends you back out into the mystery of living."  — NPR's Fresh Air

From the Publisher

★ 2024-12-28
A gripping novel about grief and loss.

In her autobiographical novel, Giraud chronicles the mundane events leading up to her husband Claude’s accidental death 20 years ago. One afternoon, as he’s running a series of errands, he crashes a borrowed Honda CBR900 Fireblade motorcycle. Though it’s a tragedy of chance and circumstance, Giraud tortures herself, wondering if there’s something she did to contribute to this fateful accident. In elegant but straightforward prose, Giraud’s narrator asks a series of unanswerable questions: Why did he ride that particular motorcycle? Why did he need to make a detour? What could she have done so that he might still be alive? “I’m writing from this remote setting where I’ve landed,” Giraud begins, “and from which I perceive the world as a slightly blurry film that for a long time has been shot without me.” Though the narrator pores over each and every action her husband took, as if examining a film strip, existing in the past offers no answers. Rather, all the what ifs have “made [her] live [her] life in the past conditional.” “It’s like trying to wring out a dry cloth,” she writes with bemusement. “And yet.” Though we get tidbits of their marriage and work, Giraud is more interested in parsing the day of Claude’s death, not in scenes they shared while he was still alive. Ultimately, Giraud understands that “there’s no chronological or methodological order to any series of events” even as she tries to make sense of this random tragedy. 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.

An exhaustive inquiry into an irrevocable loss.

Kirkus Reviews