Annie Ernaux

With extraordinary voice and poignant bravery, this novel allows the reader to experience a 20-year-old woman's reflections as she lies suffering from a back-alley abortion. Denise Lesur, alone in her college dorm room, reviews her coming-of-age in postwar France and her passages in life from a middle-class upbringing …

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 thirty years old, a teacher married to an executive, mother of two infant sons. …

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.

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 …