A Woman's Story

Reviews / Votes

'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? 'What emerges is something that verges on the mystical: Ernaux writes as though she is not writing but unearthing something that already exists.'

- Lucy Thynne, The London Magazine? 'The writing itself in A Woman's Story is truly exquisite. Annie Ernaux is a master of the form: her crisp sentences and plain style manage to convey the story so clearly, leaving the reader in no doubt of its genuineness. At the same time, this purity of language transmutes the most difficult emotions with highly effective results.'

- Gosia Buzzanca, Buzz 'The author of one of the most important oeuvres in French literature, Annie Ernaux's work is as powerful as it is devastating, as subtle as it is seeting'

- Edouard Louis, author of Change? '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 '[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 has just lost.'

- Washington Post 'Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir's role of chronicler to a generation.'

- Margaret Drabble, New Statesman '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.'

- 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 'I find her work extraordinary.'

- Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing 'Told in Ernaux's characteristic dispassionate, objective style, it relates the life story of the author's mother, a shopkeeper and restaurateur who in her later years was consumed by Alzheimer's. From the opening scene to the last devastating line, I dare you to find a book that packs that kind of punch (and truth) in so few pages.'

- Bartolomeo Sala, Something Curated