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The Years - Annie Ernaux

The Years

By: Annie Ernaux

Paperback | 15 November 2017

At a Glance

Paperback

RRP $29.99

$27.90

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Available in English for the first time, the latest astonishing, bestselling, and award-winning book by Annie Ernaux.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

One of theNew York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize

Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008

The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present-even projections into the future-photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.

Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.

On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure- both an intimate memoir "written" by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the "I" for the "we" (or "they", or "one") as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents' generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents' generation (and could be writing of her own book)- "From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the "we" and impersonal pronouns."


Co-winner of the2018 French-American Foundation Translation Prize in Nonfiction
Winner of the 2017 Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her entire body of work
Winner of the 2016 Strega European Prize
Industry Reviews
"The Years is an earnest, fearless book, a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism, for our period of absolute commodity fetishism." --Edmund White, The New York Times Book Review

"Annie Ernaux is ruthless. I mean that as a compliment. Perhaps no other memoirist - if, in fact, memoir-writing is what Ernaux is up to, which both is and isn't the case - is so willing to interrogate not only the details of her life but also the slippery question of identity. ... Think of The Years ... as memoir in the shape of intervention: 'all the things she has buried as shameful and which are now worthy of retrieval, unfolding, in the light of intelligence.'"
--David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

"The process of reading The Years is similar to a treasure box discovery. ... It is the kind of book you close after reading a few pages, carried away by the bittersweet taste it leaves in your mind. ... Ernaux transforms her life into history and her memories into the collective memory of a generation." --Azarin Sadegh, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Annie Ernaux's The Years, translated by Alison L. Strayer, is ostensibly the author's autobiography, but if a book can be both sinuous and fragmentary, this one is, circling around the truth, presenting a collage of images, episodes, memories and flights of imagination. The narrative voice moves between the first person plural and the third person. It's just a glorious novel - think JM Coetzee meets Joan Didion." --Alex Preston, The Guardian

"... a memoir that is humble and generous, an homage to the great French writers and thinkers of the previous century." --Bookforum

"The author of one of the most important oeuvres in French literature, Annie Ernaux's work is as powerful as it is devastating, as subtle as it is seething." --Edouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy

"One of the few indisputably great books of contemporary literature." --Emmanuel Carrere, author of The Kingdom

"One of the best books you'll ever read." --Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk

"Attentive, communal and genuinely new, Annie Ernaux's The Years is an astonishing achievement." --Olivia Laing, author of Crudo

"A book of memory, of a life and world, staggeringly and brilliantly original." --Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

"The Years is a revolution, not only in the art of autobiography but in art itself. Annie Ernaux's book blends memories, dreams, facts and meditations into a unique evocation of the times in which we lived, and live." --John Banville

You Can Find This Book In

Non-FictionBiographies & True Stories BiographiesHistoryRegional & National HistoryEuropean HistorySpecific Events & Topics in HistorySocial & Cultural HistoryMemoirsDiaries, Letters & JournalsRevolutions, Uprisings, RebellionsFrench Revolution

2019 Man Booker International Prize Shortlist

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The Years - Annie Ernaux

The Years

Paperback

RRP $29.99

$27.90

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