A Woman's Story WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

On 7 April 1986, Annie Ernaux's mother, after years of suffering from Alzheimer's disease, died in a retirement home in the suburbs of Paris. Shocked by this loss which, despite her mother's condition, she had refused to fathom, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time in an effort to recover the different facets of a woman whose openness to the world and appetite for reading created the conditions for the author's own social ascent.

Mirroring A Man's Place, in which she narrates her father's slow rise to material comfort, A Woman's Story explores the ambiguous and unshakeable bond between mother and daughter, its fluctuation over the course of their lives, the alienating worlds that separate them and the inescapable truth that we must lose the ones we love. In this quietly powerful tribute to the last thread connecting her to the world out of which she was born, Ernaux attempts to do her mother the greatest justice she can: to portray her as the individual she was.

Reviews

The author of one of the most important oeuvres in French literature, Annie Ernauxs work is as powerful as it is devastating, as subtle as it is seeting'
Edouard Louis, author of A History of Violence

Infinitely original.A Womans Storyis every womans story. [Its] power rests not in the drama of its main event but in moments that might escape unnoticed, if not for a writer desperate to recapture every last image that her memory reluctantly yields of a lost loved one.
New York Times

[A] tender, tough and moving tribute to her mothers life and death. In this lovely short book Miss Ernaux attempts to explain or, perhaps, merely to understand the complex roots and blossoms of a mother/daughter relationship by describing the life of the mother she has just lost.
Washington Post

Ernauxhas inherited de Beauvoirs role of chronicler to a generation.
Margaret Drabble,New Statesman

Reading her is likegettingto know a friend, the way they tell you about themselves over long conversations that sometimes take years, revealing things slowly, looping back to some parts of their life over and over.
Joanna Biggs,London Review of Books

AnnieErnauxis one of my favourite contemporary writers, original and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in her world for months.
Sheila Heti, author ofMotherhood

I find her work extraordinary.
Eimear McBride, author ofA Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

Author Bio

Born in 1940, AnnieErnauxgrew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National dEnseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particularA Mans PlaceandA Womans Story, have become contemporary classics in France. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.