The Years Signed & Numbered Indie Exclusive Edition

The Years is published here as a limited edition casebound hardback as part of Fitzcarraldo Editions’ First Decade Collection, featuring marbled endpapers and signed and numbered bookplates.
The First Decade Collection is a hardback limited edition series featuring ten important books from Fitzcarraldo Editions’ first decade of publishing. Designed by art director Ray O’Meara, each book is casebound in fine linen cloth with custom marbled endpapers and signed and numbered book plates, with a run of 1000 copies each.
The First Decade Collection reflects the breadth of Fitzcarraldo Editions’ contemporary publishing, which focuses on ambitious, imaginative and innovative writing, both in translation and in the English language, and marks a decade of publishing. The 2015, 2018, 2022 and 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature laureates Svetlana Alexievich, Olga Tokarczuk, Annie Ernaux and Jon Fosse are all included in the series, out on 24 October 2024.

Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and collective, and a new genre – the collective autobiography – in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is ‘a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism’ (New York Times), a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.

‘Attentive, communal and genuinely new, Annie Ernaux’s The Years is an astonishing achievement.’ - Olivia Laing, author of Everybody.

‘A book of memory, of a life and world, staggeringly and brilliantly original.’ - Philippe Sands, author of East West Street.

‘Annie Ernaux is long overdue to be recognised in Britain as one of the most important writers in contemporary France, and this edition of The Years ought to do the trick. Originally published there in 2008, it was immediately heralded as Ernaux’s masterpiece, her brief Remembrance of Things Past. It has been expertly rendered into English by Alison Strayer, who captures all the shadings of Ernaux’s prose, all its stops and starts, its changes in pace and in tone, its chatterings,...read more...