Annie Ernaux's The Years was initially published in French in 2008. Despite being an autobiography, the book is told in third-person point of view. In the book, Ernaux chronicles her life from 1941 to 2006. It is simultaneously an exploration of Ernaux's past and her predictions for her future. In writing the book, Ernaux drew upon photos, books, songs, radio, the news, and, perhaps most importantly, nearly six decades worth of intimate diaries.
Though The Years is a fundamentally intimate story which describes Ernaux's life and conflicts, Ernaux intended to write an autobiography for the rest of the world. In fact, she intended to write a "collective" autobiography. It is, in other words, a novel for her and a book for all of humanity at the same time.
When it was initially published in France in 2008, The Years was considered to be the crown jewel in Ernaux's already long and illustrious bibliography. After the book was translated into English, it was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker Prize. More significantly and importantly, however, the English translation of the novel was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. In his glowing review of the book for The New York Times, Edmund White called it a "collective autobiography."
