The Years

The Years is a 2008 book by Annie Ernaux, published in France by Éditions Gallimard. It is often described as a hybrid memoir, although the author treats it as a novel. For the first time in her work, Ernaux refers to herself in the third person, using "elle", which allows her to distance herself from her former self and observe her almost as a stranger.

The book covers nearly sixty years, from 1941 to 2006. It starts from photographs of the author taken during that period, which the narrator describes and comments on, and from which memories of the time emerge, chosen for their social significance. Her personal story is thus woven into the history of French society from the postwar years to the early 2000s: changes in customs, religion, consumption, education and the condition of women. The result is at once intimate, impersonal and collective, and the critic Edmund White called it a "collective autobiography".

The book was very well received in France. Le Monde described it as a masterful immersion in the memory of a woman and included it among the one hundred novels that have most engaged its editors since 1944. Even Le Figaro, often critical of the author, called it her most beautiful book. It won, among other prizes, the Marguerite Duras Prize and the François Mauriac Prize, and many consider it her most ambitious work.