Best Selling Books by Annie Ernaux

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A New York Times Notable Book "A deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality" (Kirkus Reviews) Upon her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time, as she seeks to "capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris." She explores the bond between mother and daughter, tenuous and unshakable at once, the alienating worlds that separate them, and the inescapable truth that we must lose the ones we love. In this quietly powerful tribute, Ernaux attempts to do her mother the greatest justice she can: to portray her as the individual she was. She writes, "I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world."

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Annie Ernaux''s most recent book, dazzling and breathtaking, published in France in 2022, is about her affair with a man 30 years her junior. “A sublime book.” —Elle “Once again the work of the writer Annie Ernaux appears as both a rigorous study of life and an experiment. These fragments of living, however evanescent, are precious, irreplaceable, like a skin that never fades.” —Caroline Montpetit in Le Devoir The Young Man is Annie Ernaux’s account of her passionate love affair with A., a man some 30 years younger, when she was in her fifties. The relationship pulls her back to memories of her own youth and at the same time leaves her feeling ageless, outside of time— together with a sense that she is living her life backwards. Amidst talk of having a child together, she feels time running its course, and menopause approaching. The Young Man recalls Ernaux as the “scandalous girl” she once was, but is composed with the mastery and the self-assurance she has achieved across decades of writing. It was first published in France in 2022.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist''s defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008 The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author''s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective. On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir "written" by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the "I" for the "we" (or "they", or "one") as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents'' generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents'' generation (and could be writing of her own book): "From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the "we" and impersonal pronouns." Co-winner of the 2018 French-American Foundation Translation Prize in Nonfiction Winner of the 2017 Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her entire body of work Winner of the 2016 Strega European Prize

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A New York Times Notable Book Annie Ernaux''s father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, 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 reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France. Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world, while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously, even reluctantly admires. A Man''s Place is the companion book to her critically acclaimed memoir about her mother, A Woman''s Story.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Annie Ernaux’s 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 only child, she learns that she has replaced another daughter—“the little saint,” “the absent one in every conversation,” who lives on in Annie’s parents’ wordless grief. Taking the form of a letter to the unknown sister, The Other Girl was published in French in 2011 as part of the Affranchis collection (published by les éditions du Nil), which invited writers to compose “the letter they’d never written,” inspired by Kafka’s Letter to His Father. “I had to come to terms with this mysterious inconsistency: you, the good girl, were not saved, but I, the demon, survived. More than survived, was miraculously saved. So you had to die at six for me to come into the world and be saved.” The Other Girl by the 2022 Nobel Laureate appears now for the first time in an English language version, adding a necessary and wondrous piece to the great and ongoing puzzle that is the oeuvre of one of our greatest living writers, Annie Ernaux.

“Annie Ernaux’s work,” wrote Richard Bernstein in the New York Times, “represents a severely pared-down Proustianism, a testament to the persistent, haunting and melancholy quality of memory.” In the New York Times Book Review, Kathryn Harrison concurred: “Keen language and unwavering focus allow her to penetrate deep, to reveal pulses of love, desire, remorse.” In this “journal” Ernaux turns her penetrating focus on those points in life where the everyday and the extraordinary intersect, where “things seen” reflect a private life meeting the larger world. From the war crimes tribunal in Bosnia to social issues such as poverty and AIDS; from the state of Iraq to the world’s contrasting reactions to Princess Diana’s death and the starkly brutal political murders that occurred at the same time; from a tear-gas attack on the subway to minute interactions with a clerk in a store: Ernaux’s thought-provoking observations map the world’s fleeting and lasting impressions on the shape of inner life.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE The diary of one of France’s most important, award-winning writers during the year she had a passionate and secret love affair with a Russian diplomat Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters, saying “his desire for me is the only thing I can be sure of.” She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives only to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death. Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any that she has written, a haunting, desperate view of strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A Frozen Woman charts Ernaux''s teenage awakening, and then the parallel progression of her desire to be desirable and her ambition to fulfill herself in her chosen profession - with the inevitable conflict between the two. And then she is 30 years old, a teacher married to an executive, mother of two infant sons. She looks after their nice apartment, raises her children. And yet, like millions of other women, she has felt her enthusiasm and curiosity, her strength and her happiness, slowly ebb under the weight of her daily routine. The very condition that everyone around her seems to consider normal and admirable for a woman is killing her. While each of Ernaux''s books contain an autobiographical element, A Frozen Woman, one of Ernaux''s early works, concentrates the spotlight piercingly on Annie herself. Mixing affection, rage and bitterness, A Frozen Woman shows us Ernaux''s developing art when she still relied on traditional narrative, before the shortened form emerged that has since become her trademark.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Another masterpiece of remembering from Annie Ernaux, the Man Booker International Prize–shortlisted author of The Years. In A Girl’s Story, Annie Ernaux revisits the season 50 years earlier when she found herself overpowered by another’s will and desire. In the summer of 1958, 18-year-old Ernaux submits her will to a man’s, and then he moves on, leaving her without a “master,” bereft. Now, 50 years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman that she wanted to forget completely. And to discover that here, submerged in shame, humiliation, and betrayal, but also in self-discovery and self-reliance, lies the origin of her writing life.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE An extraordinary evocation of a grown daughter’s attachment to her mother, and of both women’s strength and resiliency. I Remain in Darkness recounts Annie’s attempts first to help her mother recover from Alzheimer’s disease, and then, when that proves futile, to bear witness to the older woman’s gradual decline and her own experience as a daughter losing a beloved parent. I Remain in Darkness is a new high water mark for Ernaux, surging with raw emotional power and her sublime ability to use language to apprehend her own life’s particular music. A Washington Post Top Memoir of 1999

"Cover" -- "Half Title" -- "Title" -- "Copyright" -- "Contents" -- "ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS" -- "INTRODUCTION" -- "NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION AND APPENDIX" -- "SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY" -- "LA PLACE

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 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 environment. She captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of a great city: tortured, chaotic, lyrical, and powerfully alive. Exteriors is in many ways the most ecstatic of Ernaux''s books--the first in which she appears largely free of the haunting personal relationships she has written about so powerfully elsewhere, and the first in which she is able to leave the past behind her.

Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature Originally published in 1977, Do What They Say or Else is the second novel by French author Annie Ernaux. Set in a small town in Normandy, France, the novel tells the story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Anne, who lives with her working-class parents. The story, which takes place during the summer and fall of Anne’s transition from middle school to high school, is narrated in a stream-of-consciousness style from her point of view. Ernaux captures Anne’s adolescent voice, through which she expresses her keen observations in a highly colloquial style. As the novel progresses and Anne’s feelings about her parents, her education, and her sexual encounters evolve, she grows into a more mature but also more conflicted and unhappy character, leaving behind the innocence of her middle school years. Not only must she navigate the often-confusing signals she receives from boys, but she also finds herself moving further and further away from her parents as she surpasses their educational level and worldview.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE "Happening recounts what it was like to be a young woman whose life changed — and world ominously narrowed — in 1963 with an unwanted pregnancy. . . . It feels urgently of the moment." --The New York Times In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience. Now an award-winning film by Audrey Diwan Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival Official Selection of the Sundance Film Festival

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A New York Times Notable Book In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her 2 year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in the pieces of its aftermath, she is able to find it.

La Place looks at a daughter’s relationship with her father. In a fragmented and retrospective way the narrator describes her feelings of separation and betrayal that arise when education and marriage place her in a social class with different values, language, tastes and behaviour. She explores the ways in which individual experience is related to class and group attitudes and at the same time tells us a great deal about French society in general since the turn of the century. It is a concentrated text, cut through with irony and may be read in different ways. La Place will be an accessible and exciting addition to French studies courses.

Published for the first time in a beautiful collectible edition, the essential lecture delivered by the 2022 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Annie Ernaux. «J’écrirai por venger ma race» 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 defense of literature and of political writing in her Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm on December 7, 2022. To write of her own life, she asserts, is to “shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed;” to mine individual experience is to find collective emancipation. Ernaux’s speech is a bold assertion of the capacity of writing to give people a sense of their own worth, and of one writer’s commitment to bearing witness to life, its joys and its injustices. Includes Annie Ernaux''s Nobel lecture, her Nobel banquet speech, a congratulatory speech by Professor Anders Olsson, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature, and the Nobel opening address by Professor Carl-Henrik Heldin, Chairman of the board of the Nobel Foundation.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE "My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon," begins Shame, the probing story of the twelve-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the single traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.