The Other Girl
Annie Ernaux author Alison L Strayer translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publishing:25th Sep '25
£10.99
This title is due to be published on 25th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
One Sunday in Yvetôt, August 1950. Annie is playing outside in the sun. Her mother steps out of the grocery to chat with a customer, a few metres from her. The two women’s conversation is perfectly audible and the scraps of an unparalleled confidence are etched forever in Annie’s memory. Before she was born, her parents had another daughter. She died at the age of six from diphtheria. Annie will never hear another word from her parents about this unknown sister, nor will she ever ask them a single question about her: their family unit has formed in the image of its vanished predecessor. In The Other Girl, brilliantly translated for the first time into English by Alison L. Strayer, Annie Ernaux explores the meaning of this family secret, and the insurmountable distance that separates the two sisters.
‘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, hardly mentioning others.’
— 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
‘Across the ample particularities of over forty years and twenty-one books, almost all short, subject-driven memoirs, Ernaux has fundamentally destabilized and reinvented the genre in French literature.’
— Audrey Wollen, The Nation
‘Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir’s role of chronicler to a generation.’
— Margaret Drabble, New Statesman
‘I find her work extraordinary.’
— Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing
ISBN: 9781804271841
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
64 pages