The original French edition, La Place, won the Prix Renaudot in 1984, and in 2008 she won the prestigious Prix de la Langue Française for her oeuvre. The biography is also self-reflexive in its inquiry and suggests the question: what does it mean to contain a life within a number of pages? Memory blots and "it is far more difficult to dig up forgotten memories than it is to invent them", as Ernaux concludes. Annie Ernaux promises the reader "no lyrical reminiscences" when writing about her father's life running a grocery store and cafe in rural France and she is meticulous in her descriptions of her own childhood.
Mia Colleran A Man’s PlaceĪnnie Ernaux translated by Tanya Leslie Fitzcarraldo Editions, £8.99 Not simply a short biography of man manacled to class assumptions, this is also, ironically, an exercise in the art of unsentimental writing. It is a lyrical reminder of the hard (and indeed often unrelated) work it takes to be a wordsmith, which is justified daily in the joy of putting pen to paper and writing book after book. Translated from the original French, this is a female manifesto for a writer's life. Aged 20, she moved to Budapest for a year where she could, "just read and write all day for months, with no interruptions".
French author Julia Kerninon is the bibliophile many writers should aspire to be she writes exactingly of a childhood imbued with literature and an adolescence spent mentored by poets in Paris. Julia Kerninon translated by Ruth Driver Les Fugitives, £8.99 This 60-page slip of a book holds more inspiration than its page count would suggest. Don't just listen to him but decide for yourselves, he tells us – good advice as there isn't really much worth listening to. He portrays himself as a staunch defender of fact but asserting that the Nazis were socialists somewhat undermines that stance, as do his "climate scepticism" and his belief that the US cannot be imperialist because the desire to break away from an empire led to its founding. Seeking to offer disillusioned left-wing readers "classically liberal principles that stand the test of time", he is, at best, vague about what they are. He castigates the left for its intolerance but, curiously, quotes no left-wing thinkers of substance. Dave Rubin Constable, £18.99 This is Dave Rubin's story of why he left the left and why the reader should too, offering a 10-step guide to doing so.
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