Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2022
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 man where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, Ernaux seeks the truth behind an existence lived, for a time, entirely for someone else.
‘The triumph of Ernaux’s approach … is to cherish commonplace emotions while elevating the banal expression of them … A monument to passions that defy simple explanations.’ New York Times
‘A work of lyrical precision and diamond-hard clarity.’ New Yorker
‘All this – the suffering and anxiety of waiting, the brief soulagement of lovemaking, the lethargy and fatigue that follow, the renewal of desire, the little indignities and abjections of both obsession and abandonment – Ernaux tells with calm, almost tranquillized matter-of-factness [that] feels like determination, truth to self, clarity of purpose.’ Washington Post
Physical Info: 4.45 x 0.24 x 7.76 inches | Paperback