Annie Ernaux is a French writer who has been recognized and celebrated since the 1970s and who has carved out a very singular and original path in the French literary world until the Nobel Prize that she won in 2022. Almost exclusively autobiographical, her work is a precise and persevering search for herself through writing. Coming from a working-class background, she questions her modest origins and her identity as a woman and does not hesitate to speak for the most disadvantaged in an empathetic and humble way. Her style, simple and uncluttered, never seeks virtuosity and strives instead to achieve a form of authenticity and universality.

In Les Années, published in 2008, she retraces 60 years of her life through the description of personal photographs. She allows herself to be carried by the memories that come to her mind and tries to find a form of accuracy and relevance by passing from "I" to "she", as a mark of passing time. As always with Annie Ernaux, through her own experience it is the social history of France that takes shape and gives to this book a universal message.

We read this book in the winter of 2022.