An utterly beguiling fever dream of a novel... Its sheer technical bravura places it head and shoulder above pretty much everything else on the [Booker] longlist

Writing so beautiful it stops the reader on the page

A time-bending, location-hopping tale of love, truth and the power of seeing... Increasingly surreal and thoroughly gripping

Exquisite... A brilliant Booker nominee... Ultimately, Levy is concerned with power – the forms it takes in our lives, the extent to which it is something we both possess and are subjected to

One of the big stories in English fiction this decade has been the return and triumph of Deborah Levy... You would call her example inspiring if it weren't clearly impossible to emulate

An ice-cold skewering of patriarchy, humanity and the darkness of the 20th century Europe

In one short and sly book after another, she writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both

Charged with themes spanning memory and mortality, beauty and time, it's as electrifying as it is mysterious

Intelligent and supple...a dizzying tale of life across time and borders

It's clever, raw and doesn't play by any rules

Superbly crafted, enigmatic, tantalizing... Levy defies gravity in a daring, time-bending new novel... Head-spinning and playful, her writing offers sophistication and delightful artistry

One of the best books I have ever read

playful, consistently surprising...Levy brilliantly plumbs the divide between the self and others

A bittersweet love story, told from the perspective of a gay man remembering his first romantic affair as a teenager in a small town in the south of France in 1984.

At first erotic and joyous, ultimately elegiac and haunting, Lie With Me is a deceptively slender book as big as life itself

In spare yet evocative prose, elegantly translated by Molly Ringwald, Philippe Besson relates the erotic awakening of two adolescent boys in a small French town in the 1980s. Lie With Me captures their world with the grainy poignancy of an old high school yearbook, while movingly conveying the quintessential human dramas of longing, love, and letting go.

The French Brokeback Mountain

A man looks back at his first love, a forbidden homosexual affair during his last year of high school in a small French town in the 1980s. Though a screenwriter and playwright, Mr. Besson does not rely on direct dialogue but reconstructs conversations from a fog of memories in this coming-of-age story. A French best seller likened to "Call Me By Your Name" and "Brokeback Mountain," the novel marks the first English translation by the actress and writer Ms. Ringwald, a longtime Francophile.

Molly Ringwald translated this French Call Me By Your Name-esque novel about two teenagers in 1984 Bordeaux as they fall in love in the shadows, leaving one of them to reflect on the relationship many years later

There's much book-to-filmstar appeal in this moving, well-plotted tale: Elle dubbed it "the French Brokeback Mountain"; there's something of Call Me by Your Name's Elio in Philippe, who lives in the books he reads and writes; and actress and writer Ringwald ably translates.

Moving ... Besson's writing and Ringwald's smooth translation provide emotional impact.

Universally touching

Besson is a thoughtful writer who can strike home with vivid imagery. . . [and] deftly translated [by Ringwald].

This Year's Call Me by Your Name... While the starring peach of Call Me by Your Name was the perfect metanym for that lush and gauzy tale, Lie With Me unpeels like a springy orange. The boys' relationship is bare but segmented, each encounter entirely isolated from the others, with only a thin membrane to keep all that tart juice from bursting out. . . [A] moving and graceful novel

A story of queer adolescence in rural France in the 1980s, Besson's "Lie With Me" is a primer on the tenacity of desire... Molly Ringwald, by delightful coincidence an icon of '80s John Hughes films, provides a limpid translation that preserves all the earnest mystery of teenage sex... Besson keeps his study in intimacy fresh through nimble plot twists, in which the present disturbs a certain version of the past, creating repercussions for the future. Equal parts André Aciman and Marguerite Duras, "Lie With Me" poignantly reflects on why some memories fade and others do not.

A slender, sad, acute novel... absolutely excellent

Full of Proustian echoes, this story of gay adolescence deals with complex issues of class, shame and secrecy

A poignant tale that captures the intensity of first love with all its sadness, longing and regret

A clear-sighted and passionate coming-of-age narrative. Detailing in elegant and plain prose the anxious and intense first falling-in-love between two schoolboys, Lie With Me has a tenderness and insight that is reminiscent of the writings of Garth Greenwell. This novel can be read in a matter of hours, but its impact, like the love affair it details, will echo in the mind

Moving, intense, sad and sensuous