Awards

• Short-listed for Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Overview

A deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality' (Kirkus Reviews), this is Ernaux's daunting journey through time as she was confronted with the reality of her mother's death from Alzheimer's. Exploring the tenuous bond between mother and daughter, at once tenuous and unshakeable, the alienating worlds that separate them, and the inescapable truth that we must one day lose the ones we love, this is a quietly powerful tribute. A New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Fiction prize finalist.'

Full Product Details

9781583225752

Table of Contents

Reviews

An act of great love and of great pain.

Indinitely 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 lovded one. [A] tender, tough and moving tribute to her mother's 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 had just lost. Nothing less than a minimalist revelation, a piece of writing so spare and sharp that it cuts straight to the heart with accuracy of a surgeon's scalpel. [An] unadorned and powerful novel...with the clam, and honesty that follow deep grief and relfection. Someshere along the way, and without losing the impact of specific details, A Woman's Story transcends the individual.... Ernaux finds the turth of her mother's life, and it turns out to be not one thing, but the whole story. An act of great love and of great pain.

Author Information

Born in 1940, ANNIE ERNAUX grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and began teaching high 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. She won the prestigious Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place when it was first published in French in 1984. The English edition was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The English edition of A Woman’s Story was a New York Times Notable Book.

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