La Place is the novel that truly established Annie Ernaux as one of France's greatest writers when it was published in 1984 and when she received the prestigious Prix Renaudot for it. The novel was written after the death of her father, and the writer recounts her childhood years in a small village in Normandy where her parents ran a small grocery store and a café. She studies, marries and becomes a bourgeois woman, which cuts her off from her family, the shame and misunderstanding breaks the bonds of childhood. In this short autobiographical novel, Annie Ernaux questions the place of what French sociology has called the transclasses, those individuals who, through their studies and career, are as if lost in a double impossible identity: that of coming from a working-class background and that of not quite belonging to the upper class. A tear that will mark the young woman and motivates her vocation as a universal writer.

We read this book in summer of 2021.