Overview

'The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city - the whole world - with a person you may never have met.' These words set the framework for The Possession, a striking portrait of a woman after a love affair has ended. Annie Ernaux pulls the reader through every step of jealousy, of a woman's need to know who has replaced her in a lost beloved's life. Ernaux's writing, characteristically gorgeous in its precision, depicts the all too familiar human tendency to seek control and certainty after rejection.

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9781804271490

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‘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

Author Information

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.  Anna Moschovakis is a poet, novelist and translator. She is the author of the novels An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, Participation and Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love. Her translation of David Diop's novel At Night All Blood Is Black won the 2021 International Booker Prize. She has also translated Albert Cossery's The Jokers, Annie Ernaux's The Possession, Bresson on Bresson, and (with Christine Schwartz-Harley) Marcelle Sauvageot's Commentary. 

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