In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies. Awarded the Golden Lion in Venice in 2021.

Interview with Raphaëlle Rérolle

Fictional account of an affair between a young woman and a married Soviet diplomat. English edition in Purdy-Kresge Stacks PQ 2665 .R67 P3713 1993.

Ernaux reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and café in rural France. Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world, while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously, even reluctantly admires.
‘Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir’s role of chronicler to a generation.’
— Margaret Drabble, New Statesman
English edition in Purdy Kresge Stacks: Purdy-Kresge Library PQ 2665 .R67 P5813 1992

Originally published in 1977 (as Ce qu'ils disent ou rien; Shame) this is the second novel by French author Annie Ernaux. Set in a small town in Normandy, France, the novel tells the story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Anne, who lives with her working-class parents. The story, which takes place during the summer and fall of Anne's transition from middle school to high school, is narrated in a stream-of-consciousness style from her point of view. As the novel progresses, Anne's feelings about her parents, her education, and her sexual encounters evolve.