ESSAYISM is a personal, critical and polemical book about the genre, its history and its contemporary possibilities, itself an example of what it describes: an essay that is curious and digressive and at the same time held together by a personal voice and a polemical point.

Taking the form of random journal entries over the course of seven years, Exteriors concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person's lived environment. Ernaux captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris: poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive.

From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration.

Flower is a book of realistic confessions, likes, dislikes, memories and no-brainer observations. It treats personal truth as unavailable, something that must be made up and convincing.

Getting Lost is the diary kept by Annie Ernaux during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a haunting record of a woman in the grips of love, desire and despair.

An unnamed narrator, recently bereaved, travels to Olevano, a small village southeast of Rome. Written in a rich and poetic style, GROVE is an exquisite novel of grief, love and landscapes.

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame.

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame.