Description

‘Brilliantly spiky … As well as boasting compelling, sharp prose, Name forces readers to question what one’s name means – and to who’ AnOther Magazine, Best Books of 2025

‘Unsettling and beautiful, admirably unabashed’ Los Angeles Review of Books

‘Debre’s voice is Camusian, comic, stark, relentless and totally hypnotic’ Rachel Kushner

‘Written with edge and urgency in a voice that is both vulnerable and in full command’ Colm Toibin

‘Annie Ernaux, just edgier. Her prose is gorgeously spare and practical’ Irish Independent

Name is Debre’s most intense novel yet, a fresh feat of sharp, spare, yet explosive prose. Set partly in the narrator’s childhood, it explores ideas about origins and reshapes relationships to our various inheritances: name, family, class, habits. As the novel unravels, freedom is revealed as a redefining of these relationships on one’s own terms. Brilliant and unflinching, Name affirms and extends Debre’s radical project.

Publisher Review

The most compulsive voice I’ve read in years — Olivia Laing * Guardian * Constance Debre is radical in shucking off not only the trappings of matrimony but also of class * Financial Times * Bold and brash and at the same time quietly controlled … Debre is brilliantly deadpan * Spectator * A spitting, snarling tour de force of fuck-you feminist defiance — Imogen Crimp