Order of Annie Ernaux Books

Annie Ernaux is a French author of autobiographical fiction, memoirs, and literary nonfiction books. She is the author of A Man’s Place, Simple Passion, Happening, and The Years. Her writing explores memory, class, gender, family, and personal experience, and she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022.

Annie Ernaux made her debut as an author in 1974 with Les Armoires vides, published in English as Cleaned Out. Below is a list of Annie Ernaux’s books in order of when they were originally released:

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

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Annie Eranux Synopses: Cleaned Out is a standalone novel by Annie Ernaux. Cleaned Out follows Denise Lesur, a 20-year-old woman dealing with the aftermath of an illegal abortion. Alone in her college dorm room, Denise reflects on the stifling middle-class upbringing that led her to this painful moment. In this powerful and deeply personal novel, Annie Ernaux breaks from traditional French literary conventions to explore abortion, adolescence, and the difficult process of coming to terms with one’s childhood.

Do What They Say or Else is the second novel by French author Annie Ernaux. Set in a small town in Normandy, France, it follows fifteen-year-old Anne, who lives with her working-class parents. Spanning the summer and fall as Anne moves from middle school to high school, the novel is told from her perspective in a stream-of-consciousness style. Through Anne’s candid, highly colloquial voice, Ernaux captures her sharp observations of the world around her.

As Anne’s attitudes toward her parents, education, and sexual experiences change, she gradually leaves behind the innocence of childhood and becomes more mature, yet increasingly conflicted and unhappy. She must make sense of the confusing signals she receives from boys while also growing more distant from her parents. As her education advances beyond theirs, the gap between Anne and her family widens, forcing her to confront how much she is changing – and how far she is moving from the world she once knew.

In The Possession, Annie Ernaux examines the painful and revealing process of looking inward after the end of a love affair. With her characteristic precision and honesty, she explores the strange sense of self-discovery that can emerge after a relationship ends, when memories of a former lover force us to reconsider our own desires, emotions, and identity. At times, she even examines herself through the perspective of the person she has lost.

The Other Girl is a memoir by Annie Ernaux. In the summer of 1950, ten-year-old Annie Ernaux accidentally discovers a family secret: she once had a sister who died at the age of six, two years before Annie was born. Until then, she had believed she was an only child. Now she learns that she came into the world after the death of another daughter – the “little saint,” “the absent one in every conversation,” whose memory remains embedded in her parents’ silent grief.

Written as a letter to the sister she never knew, The Other Girl was originally published in French in 2011 as part of the Affranchis collection, which asked writers to compose “the letter they’d never written,” inspired by Kafka’s Letter to His Father. Ernaux confronts the unsettling reality of her sister’s death and her own survival, writing, “I had to come to terms with this mysterious inconsistency: you, the good girl, were not saved, but I, the demon, survived. More than survived, was miraculously saved. So you had to die at six for me to come into the world and be saved.”

Now available in English for the first time, The Other Girl offers a deeply intimate look at family, memory, guilt, and identity, adding another revealing piece to the body of work by the 2022 Nobel Prize laureate Annie Ernaux.