The Other Girl - by Annie Ernaux (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Annie Ernaux's profound investigation into the life of her mysterious older sister, who died at six, two years before Annie was born.

In the summer of 1950, when Annie Ernaux is ten, she inadvertently learns she had a sister who died at six, two years before her own birth. Having believed she was an only child, she learns that she has replaced another daughter--"the little saint," "the absent one in every conversation," who lives on in Annie's parents' wordless grief.

Taking the form of a letter to the unknown sister, The Other Girl was published in French in 2011 as part of the Affranchis collection (published by les éditions du Nil), which invited writers to compose "the letter they'd never written," inspired by Kafka's Letter to His Father. "I had to come to terms with this mysterious inconsistency: you, the good girl, were not saved, but I, the demon, survived. More than survived, was miraculously saved. So you had to die at six for me to come into the world and be saved."

The Other Girl by the 2022 Nobel Laureate appears now for the first time in an English language version, adding a necessary and wondrous piece to the great and ongoing puzzle that is the oeuvre of one of our greatest living writers, Annie Ernaux.

Review Quotes

*"In this gently heartbreaking account, Nobel Prize winner Ernaux (The Use of Photography) reflects on the death of her older sister, Ginette, in 1938, two years before the author was born. Months before the diphtheria vaccine was made compulsory in France, six-year-old Ginette died of the disease. Taking inspiration from Franz Kafka's Letter to His Father, Ernaux addresses her late sibling directly, compiling all she knows of Ginette's life, death, and legacy into a diaristic dossier. Though Ernaux's parents never spoke of Ginette, the author tracks down and interviews the few living people who remember the girl's death, seeking to map the devastation it wrought on her family before Ernaux was born. Elsewhere, she recalls hearing adults call Ginette a "nice" girl and Ernaux a "demon," which saddled her with lifelong feelings of inadequacy, and makes a number of poignant literary allusions, comparing her late sister to Peter Pan and Jane Eyre's tuberculosis-stricken Helen Burns. Poetic and raw but never maudlin, this beautiful meditation on a very particular kind of grief will resonate with anyone trying to process a major loss of their own."
--Publishers Weekly, starred review

About the Author

The author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, ANNIE ERNAUX is considered by many to be France's most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. More recently she received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Her other works include Exteriors, A Girl's Story, A Woman's Story, The Possession, Simple Passion, Happening, I Remain in Darkness, Shame, A Frozen Woman, A Man's Place, The Young Man, and The Use of Photography.

ALISON L. STRAYER is a Canadian writer and translator. Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Literature and for Translation, the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal, and the Prix littéraire France-Québec. She lives in Paris.