Shame

$12.95

Author: Annie Ernaux

Translator: Tanya Leslie

Publisher: Seven Stories Press (2009)

"My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon." Thus begins Shame, the probing story of the twelve-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the single traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.

“The careful, unflinching specificities of Shame give voice to a resonant and universal truth; and Ernaux's particular discomfort is, most profoundly, that of being human.”

–New York Times Book Review

“Ernaux writes without beginnings or endings. Her stories have no 'arc.' But they tend to sit down next to you on that commuter train and will not leave, no matter how politely you ask them.”

–Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review

“With unsparing lucidity, Ernaux strips herself and her memories of any comforting myth and in the process, she forces us to face the jarring facts of being human.”

–Publishers Weekly

Memoir