Bøker 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.

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 lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive.

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.

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.

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.

Annie Ernaux's account of her passionate love affair with A., a man some 30 years younger. 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. A dazzling and breathtaking work.

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"--