Annie Ernaux Books

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

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.

Annie Ernaux passionately defends the power of literature and political writing in her Nobel Lecture, emphasizing that writing about personal experiences can alleviate loneliness and foster collective emancipation. She highlights her commitment to using her voice to witness life's joys and injustices, illustrating the profound impact of storytelling on individual worth. The book includes Ernaux's Nobel lecture, banquet speech, and additional remarks from Nobel Committee members, showcasing the significance of her work in contemporary literature.

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

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 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."

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, a haunting record of a woman in the grips of love, desire and despair.

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 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 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.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Twelve books written by 2022 Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux and published by Seven Stories Press. The Annie Ernaux collection from Seven Stories Press includes: - The Years - Getting Lost - Simple Passion - A Girl's Story - Happening - Shame - A Man's Place - A Woman's Story - A Frozen Woman - I Remain in Darkness - Exteriors - The Possession The author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, ANNIE ERNAUX is considered by many to be France's most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. More recently she received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Her other works include Exteriors, A Girl's Story, A Woman's Story, The Possession, Simple Passion, Happening, I Remain in Darkness, Shame, A Frozen Woman, and A Man's Place.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREAn 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