Böcker av Annie Ernaux

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 attache 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 divorced with two grown sons, living in the suburbs 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. She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives merely to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the moment of 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. Translated brilliantly for the first time by Alison L. Strayer,Getting Lostis a haunting record of a woman in the grips of love, desire and despair.

In A GIRL'S STORY, Annie Ernaux revisits the summer of 1958, her first away from home, and recounts the first night she spent with a man.

A powerful meditation on ageing and familial love, I Remain in Darkness recounts Annie Ernaux's attempts 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. Haunting and devastatingly poignant, I Remain in Darkness showcases Ernaux's unique talent for evoking life's darkest and most bewildering episodes.

At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is 'a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism' (New York Times), a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.

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.

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 her father throughout his life.

A powerful stage adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux's critically acclaimed 'masterpiece' (The Guardian), premiered in this English translation at the Almeida Theatre, London, in 2024.

A deeply affecting tribute to her mother's life and death by Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature.

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 in book form for the first time, Annie Ernaux's Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm in December 2022, translated by Alison L. Strayer.

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. At once stark and tender, The Young Man is a taut encapsulation of Ernaux's relationship to time, memory and writing.

In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux's Simple Passion documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion.

A revelatory meditation on class and consumer culture, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux

"Taking the form of random journal entries over seven years, Exteriors captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris. Poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive"--

'La photo en noir et blanc d'une petite fille en maillot de bain foncé, sur une plage de galets. En fond, des falaises. Elle est assise sur un rocher plat, ses jambes robustes étendues bien droites devant elle, les bras en appui sur le rocher, les yeux fermés, la tête légèrement penchée, souriant. Une épaisse natte brune ramenée par-devant, l'autre laissée dans le dos. Tout révèle le désir de poser comme les stars dans Cinémonde ou la publicité d'Ambre Solaire, d'échapper à son corps humiliant et sans importance de petite fille. Les cuisses, plus claires, ainsi que le haut des bras, dessinent la forme d'une robe et indiquent le caractère exceptionnel, pour cette enfant, d'un séjour ou d'une sortie à la mer. La plage est déserte. Au dos : août 1949, Sotteville-sur-Mer.' Au travers de photos et de souvenirs laissés par les événements, les mots et les choses, Annie Ernaux donne à ressentir le passage des années, de l'après-guerre à aujourd'hui. En même temps, elle inscrit l'existence dans une forme nouvelle d'autobiographie, impersonnelle et collective.

Annie 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. Ernaux's thought-provoking observations map the world's fleeting and lasting impressions on the shape of inner life.

A fragmented and largely retrospective description of a daughter's relationship with her father, La Place deals with issues of sexuality, social standing and alienation. This is an accessible and exciting addition to French studies courses.