The Other Girl

Before she was born, Annie Ernaux's parents had another daughter who died at the age of six from diphtheria. Translated into English for the first time, The Other Girl explores the meaning of this family secret, which Annie only discovered by chance as a child and never discussed with her parents again.

‘Ernaux repeatedly stuns by the depth and honesty of her psychological observations, as she does by her frugal and unsentimental language. The Other Girl , translated with touching subtlety by Alison L. Strayer, is no exception…. This book, beautiful and profound, attests to what we already knew from her other works – that Ernaux is one of the great writers of our time, and a truly worthy Nobel.’
— Magdalena Miecznicka, Financial Times

‘ The Other Girl is that most overused adjective nowadays: haunting. But there is no other description for it.’
— NJ McGarrigle, Irish Independent

‘Across over twenty books and for the better part of the last five decades, Ernaux has gathered, broken and reassembled the infinite, singular matter of her history…. Perhaps no other literary figures, save Proust or Knausgaard, have come as near to achieving so Promethean a project.’
— Jamie Hood, The Baffler

‘Annie Ernaux manifestly believes in the liberating force of writing. Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean. And when she with great courage and clinical acuity reveals the agony of the experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are, she has achieved something admirable and enduring.’
— Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel Committee

‘Annie Ernaux writes memoir with such generosity and vulnerable power that I find it difficult to separate my own memories from hers long after I’ve finished reading.’
— Catherine Lacey, author of The Möbius Book

‘Reading her is like getting to 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, hardly mentioning others.’
— Joanna Biggs, London Review of Books

‘Annie Ernaux is 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 of Alphabetical Diaries

‘Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir’s role of chronicler to a generation.’
— Margaret Drabble, New Statesman

‘Infinitely original. A Woman’s Story is every woman’s 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 (praise for A Woman’s Story )

‘Ernaux’s genius, here as elsewhere, is in using her own experiences to bring into consciousness our painful unknown knowns, through a deeply relatable, hyper-personal objectivity.’
— Lucy Sweeney Byrne, Irish Times (praise for A Woman’s Story )

‘What emerges is something that verges on the mystical: Ernaux writes as though she is not writing bu unearthing something that already exists.’
— Lucy Thynne, The London Magazine (praise for A Woman’s Story )

‘[ Shame and The Young Man ] deserve to be read widely. Her work is self-revealing, a series of pitiless auto-autopsies…. Their disparate achievements work together to illuminate something perennially fascinating about Ernaux: her relationship to revelation and visibility. These are deeply intimate books, but in another way, Ernaux brings a disquieting impersonality to her project.’
— Megan Nolan, The Times (praise for Shame )

‘[E]xceptionally deft and precise, the very epitome of all that language can do … a surprisingly tender evocation of a bright, passionate and self-aware young girl growing up in her parents’ “café-haberdashery-grocery” in a small town in Normandy.’
— Julie Myerson, Observer (praise for Shame )

‘It’s hard to fault a book that so elegantly and engagingly shows how … past horrors of varying scale can consciously and subconsciously affect someone…. [A] prescient and eminently readable book, as well as a great introduction to a giant of French literature.’
— India Lewis, The Arts Desk (praise for Shame )

‘A lesser writer would turn these experiences into misery memoirs, but Ernaux does not ask for our pity – or our admiration. It’s clear from the start that she doesn’t much care whether we like her or not, because she has no interest in herself as an individual entity. She is an emblematic daughter of emblematic French parents, part of an inevitable historical process, which includes breaking away. Her interest is in examining the breakage … Ernaux is the betrayer and her father the betrayed: this is the narrative undertow that makes A Man’s Place so lacerating.’
— Frances Wilson, Telegraph (praise for A Man’s Place )

‘Not simply a short biography of man manacled to class assumptions, this is also, ironically, an exercise in the art of unsentimental writing…. The biography is also self-reflexive in its inquiry and suggests the question: what does it mean to contain a life within a number of pages?’
— Mia Colleran, Irish Times (praise for A Man’ Place )

‘Ernaux understands that writing about her parents is a form of betrayal…. [I]t is thrilling to read Ernaux working out, word by word, what she deems appropriate to include in each text. In being willing to show her discomfort, her disdain and her honest, careful consideration of the dilemmas of writing about real, lived lives, Ernaux has struck upon a bold new way to write memoir.’
— Ellen Peirson-Hagger, New Statesman (praise for A Man’s Place )

Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew 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 d’Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story , have become contemporary classics in France. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.