Consent: A Memoir of Stolen Adolescence

‘A Molotov cocktail flung at the face of the French establishment, a work of dazzling, highly controlled fury. A triumph’ New York Times

‘A memoir of lost adolescence … elegant, focused, fluidly translated’ Guardian

‘Rapier-sharp, written with restraint, elegance and brevity – and beautifully translated’ The Times

‘A gut-punch of a memoir with prose that cuts like a knife. Springora never loses sight of the teenage girl at the centre of her story even as she lays bare a culture’s hypocrisies and failures. Painful and powerful, Consent reads like a reckoning’ Kate Elizabeth Russell, author of My Dark Vanessa

‘Incisive and brave, Consent examines how society often fails to protect young women in the most dangerous of ways’ Louise O’Neill

‘[Vanessa Springova’s] account makes one of the strongest points yet in the French #MeToo debate’ Los Angeles Review of Books

‘Fierce and controlled … a searing indictment of an overly permissive era that has triggered a national reckoning in France’ Daily Mail

‘Her sentences gleam like metal; each chapter snaps shut with the clean brutality of a latch’ The New Yorker

‘[Consent] has something steely in its heart, and it departs from the typical American memoir of childhood abuse in exhilarating ways’ Slate

Vanessa Springora is a French editor and writer. Consent is her first book.