Live Fast

"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