*Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize* Co-winner of the 2018 French-American Foundation Translation Prize in Nonfiction Winner of the 2017 Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her entire body of work Winner of the 2016 Strega European Prize Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist\'s defining work, The Years was a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008, and is considered in French Studies departments in the US as a contemporary classic.
She writes of her parents\' generation (and could be writing of her own book): From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the we and impersonal pronouns..
Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the I for the we (or they, or one) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents\' generation ceased to exist.
Though Ernaux had for Years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir written by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story.
On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise.
A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.
Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity.
Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable.
The voice we recognize as the author\'s continually dissolves and re-emerges.
Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here.
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 six decades of diaries. *Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize* Co-winner of the 2018 French-American Foundation Translation Prize in Nonfiction Winner of the 2017 Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her entire body of work Winner of the 2016 Strega European Prize Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist\'s defining work, The Years was a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008, and is considered in French Studies departments in the US as a contemporary classic
