A sharp, angry, sexually and politically charged French novel about friendship, betrayal, AIDS, theory, desire and public argument.

Set around the Parisian intellectual and activist worlds of the 1980s and 1990s, Hate follows a group of young men whose relationships become tangled in illness, ideology, sex, rivalry, and the brutal glamour of being right.

The title is not subtle, but the book is more complicated than pure provocation: it is interested in how love turns doctrinal, how politics becomes intimate, and how a generation’s arguments about liberation, identity, and morality are lived through bodies rather than just ideas. Very much one for readers interested in queer history, post-’68 France, AIDS literature, French autofiction-adjacent novels, and books where friendship curdles into theory, resentment, loyalty, and damage.

Faber and Faber / FSG paperback. First American edition, 2010. Originally published in France by Éditions Gallimard in 2008 as La meilleure part des hommes. Good second-hand condition with visible shelfwear/handling to cover, some edge and corner wear, and page toning.