Shame

Shame by Annie Ernaux is one of the Nobel laureate’s most searching and psychologically penetrating works — an account of a single violent incident from her childhood in Normandy in 1952 and the shame that surrounded it and shaped her entire subsequent sense of self. Ernaux, twelve years old, witnessed her father try to kill her mother in a moment of rage, and she has never been able to separate that event from the complex of class shame, social aspiration, and Catholic guilt that formed her world. The book moves between personal memory and sociological analysis, examining the structures that created the shame and the ways it was transmitted. Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, Shame is essential Ernaux — formally sophisticated and emotionally unsparing.