My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.' Thus beginsand Shame, the probing story of the twelve-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With...

A woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease is taken in by her daughter who records her decline. The daughter narrates, "Today she was holding a corner of her blouse (smock), clutching onto it. In the elevator, she stood facing the mirror. I am sure she...

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...

Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines....

Getting Lostand 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,and Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but...

'I too wanted to forget that girl. Really forget her, that is, stop yearning to write about her. Stop thinking that I have to write about this girl and her desire and madness, her idiocy and pride, her hunger and her blood that ceased...

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...

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,...

Taking the form of random journal entries over the course of seven years, Exteriors concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person's lived environment. Ernaux captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris: poignantly...

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, she attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married...

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. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year...

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 forand The Possession, a striking portrait of a woman after a love affair...

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...