The years

‘The Years’ (French: Les Années) is a 2008 non-fiction book by Annie Ernaux. It has been described as a “hybrid” memoir, spanning the period of 1941 to 2006. Ernaux’s English publisher, Seven Stories Press, described it as an autobiography that is “at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective. In the book, Ernaux writes about herself in the third person (elle, or “she” in English) for the first time, providing a vivid look at French society just after the Second World War until the early 2000s. It is the moving social story of a woman and of the evolving society she lived in.