The Years

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize

Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008

The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.

Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.

On its 2008 publication in France,