The Possession

Published in the UK for the first time, The Possession is a striking meditation on jealousy and a major work by the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate.

‘Ernaux writes not in the heat of desire but in retrospect. The translation by Anna Moschovakis is chicly austere. Like concrete poetry, small paragraphs sit adrift on the page; the text is as unmoored as our protagonist…. While she dances on the edge of insanity, she revels in the pain of feeling alive. Being numb is worse than being in agony.’
— Genevieve Gaunt, The Spectator

‘The most intimate human experiences – grief, greed, fear, sickness and lust, along with other kinds of private “primordial savagery” – are laid bare throughout the prolific French author’s works, sometimes in shudderingly explicit detail, and The Possession is no exception…. Far from seeming dated, this tiny tome is even more pertinent in our digital age … capturing the exact feeling brought on by a social media algorithm producing the precise thing you want to ignore.’
— Ceci Browning, The Times

‘Raw and resonant, Annie Ernaux’s newly translated novella The Possession offers up a stream of fixations and divulgences that the narrator treats with utmost openness…. Ernaux creates a voyeuristic world that briefly but totally immerses readers and shares a piece of herself through the primary emotion that drives this book: jealousy…. Through a stream of confessions and recollections, Ernaux weaves experiences of obsession, addiction and insecurity into the human fabric of being.’
— Maria Farsoon, The Skinny

‘[A] devastating account of what it feels like to go through intense jealousy, longing and loss after an affair has ended. The need to know where they are, who they’re with, the pull of wanting to contact them but knowing you shouldn’t, how everything you see and hear reminds you of the person who has left.’
— Rick O'Shea, Irish Independent

‘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

‘Across the ample particularities of over forty years and twenty-one books, almost all short, subject-driven memoirs, Ernaux has fundamentally destabilized and reinvented the genre in French literature.’
— Audrey Wollen, The Nation

‘I find her work extraordinary.’
— Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

‘Annie Ernaux writes like no other of how jealousy brings us face to face with a doppelgänger that lives the life we think we should be living. In its searing exploration of jealousy’s assault on sanity and identity, The Possession frees us from the shame and isolation of our own obsessions.’
— Terri Apter, author of Difficult Mothers

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.