Location: Annie Ernaux's Most Important Representative Work That Established Her Literary Standing as the 2022 Nobel Laureate in Literature

Includes "A Man's Place," winner of the Renaudot Prize, one of France's three major literary awards, plus "A Woman's Story," a gaze into women's lives.



It's gone, all gone...
Father, mother, and that home,
I no longer belong there,
A rootless solitude, that is my place.


Perhaps I write because we no longer have anything to say to each other.
I want to express both the feeling of happiness and this contradictory state of mind.
Or rather, between these two extremes, like a bumpy ride from one shore to another, conflicting...
Perhaps what he was most proud of, or rather the justification for his existence, was: I belong to the world that despises him.

I dreamed I was lying in the middle of a river, the water washing over me. My belly, my vulva, became smooth again, like a little girl just beginning to sprout fine, thread-like plants, soft and floating...
And now, I can no longer hear her voice.
It was she, and her words, her hands, her movements, the way she laughed, the way she walked, that connected me, the woman I am now, to the child I once was. I have lost the last link to the world from which I came.

This book collects two classic works by Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux that established her literary standing: "A Man's Place" and "A Woman's Story." They are both a lament for her deceased parents and a retrospective of her life memories. With simple, unadorned language, Annie Ernaux blends a unique "self, society, biography" brushstroke, writing about herself while also offering a sociological observation. She not only constructed her own literary style, setting a life archetype for ordinary parents, but also captured the realities often overlooked by contemporary society.