Annie Ernaux

A Girl's Story by the illustrious Annie Ernaux, recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a profound exploration of female identity and the complex nuances of memory. This deeply resonant narrative revisits the summer of 1958, a pivotal moment in Ernaux's youth spent as a holiday camp supervisor in Normandy. During this summer, Ernaux experiences her first night...

The Years by Annie Ernaux is an extraordinary autobiographical narrative that transcends the traditional boundaries of memoir. Available in English for the first time, this remarkable book has established itself as a literature classic, lauded globally for its unique approach to storytelling and profound introspection. Spanning from 1941 to 2006, Ernaux's work doesn't merely recount her own life, but instead...

The Use of Photography recounts a passionate love affair between Annie Ernaux and the journalist and author Marc Marie, after the two met in January 2003. Ernaux had been receiving intensive chemo for breast cancer during the prior three months, and had lost all her hair from the treatments. At the end of January she had surgery, followed by radiation...

I Remain in Darkness is a deeply moving exploration of ageing, memory, and familial bonds by Nobel Prize-winning author Annie Ernaux. This poignant memoir traces Ernaux's efforts to support her mother, who is grappling with Alzheimer's disease, a condition that slowly erodes her memory and identity. As the disease progresses, Ernaux finds herself bearing witness to her mother's inevitable decline,...

On 7 April 1986, Annie Ernaux's mother, after years of suffering from Alzheimer's disease, died in a retirement home in the suburbs of Paris. Shocked by this loss which, despite her mother's condition, she had refused to fathom, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time in an effort to recover the different facets of a woman whose openness...

A meditation on the big-box superstore, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux For half a century, French writer Annie Ernaux has restlessly explored stories and subjects often considered unworthy of artistic reflection. In this exquisite meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature....

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE I will write to avenge my people. It was as a young woman that Annie Ernaux first wrote these words in her diary, giving a name to her purpose in life as a writer. She returns to them in her stirring defence of literature and of political writing in her Nobel Lecture,...

In her latest work, Annie Ernaux recounts a relationship with a student thirty years her junior—an experience that transforms her, briefly, back into the scandalous girl of her youth. When she is with him, she replays scenes she has already lived through, feeling both ageless and closer to death. Laid like a palimpsest on the present, the past's immediacy pushes...

'My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.' Thus begins Shame, the probing story of the twelve-year-old girl who will become Annie Ernaux, and the traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides...

Annie Ernaux, the laureate of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, delves deep into the essence of contemporary existence in Exteriors. Set against the backdrop of the outskirts of Paris, Ernaux crafts a narrative that is both poignantly lyrical and chaotically vibrant. Through her meticulous observations and profound reflections, she captures the raw and unfiltered pulse of urban life, making...

A Man's Place, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a poignant and unflinching memoir by acclaimed author Annie Ernaux. Through precise and unembellished prose, Ernaux crafts a vivid narrative of her father's life. The story begins with a moment of deep personal contradiction: Ernaux's father passes away just two months after she earns her teaching certificate. This...

The Young Man by Annie Ernaux is the celebrated author's most recent work, published in 2022, and winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. This dazzling and breathtaking account explores her passionate affair with a man 30 years her junior. "A sublime book." - Olivia de Lamberterie, Elle "Once again the work of the writer Annie Ernaux appears as...

Happening by Annie Ernaux is an evocative and harrowing autobiographical recount of an episode that changed the course of her life forever. Set in 1963, the narrative centres on Ernaux, a 23-year-old university student, who discovers she is pregnant. The societal norms and legal constraints of the time make this revelation not just personally devastating but socially damning. Abortion is...

The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux is a profound investigation into the life of her mysterious older sister, who died at six, two years before Annie was born. In the summer of 1950, when Annie Ernaux is ten, she inadvertently learns she had a sister who died at six, two years before her own birth. Having believed she was an...

The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city - the whole world - with a person you may never have met. These words set the framework for The Possession, a striking portrait of a woman after a love affair has ended. Annie Ernaux pulls the reader through every step of jealousy, of a woman's need...

Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her exams for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labour, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation in A Man's Place reveals the shame that haunted...

One Sunday in Yvetot, August 1950. Annie is playing outside in the sun. Her mother steps out of the grocery to chat with a customer, a few metres from her. The two women's conversation is perfectly audible; its scraps become etched forever in Annie's memory. Before she was born, her parents had another daughter. She died at the age of...

Getting Lost is the diary kept by Annie Ernaux during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, an attaché to the Soviet embassy in Paris. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate and unfiltered. In these diaries, it is 1989 and Annie is...

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE One of Annie Ernaux's most exciting and idiosyncratic works is now in paperback for the first time. In this novel, which takes the form of journal entries made over the course of seven years, Annie Ernaux concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person's lived...