Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Kindle
$11.99

Available instantly

Audiobook
$0.00
with membership trial

Hardcover
$39.03

Paperback
$11.59

$11.59 with 17 percent savings

List Price: $13.95

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery Thursday, May 16 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35

Or fastest delivery Wednesday, May 15. Order within 16 hrs 45 mins

Select delivery location

In Stock

$$11.59 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

30-day easy returns

Returns

30-day easy returns

This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.

Read full return policy

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Details

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

$4.94

This is a USED book, it is subject to external and interior wear including, underlining, highlighting, annotations, water damage, minor scuffs and tears. This is a donated book accepted as is. Stickers and sticker residue on the cover should be expected, as well as spine wear from use. There are NO codes or disc(s) included. All items ship Monday - Friday within 2-3 business days. Thank you for supporting Goodwill of OC This is a USED book, it is subject to external and interior wear including, underlining, highlighting, annotations, water damage, minor scuffs and tears. This is a donated book accepted as is. Stickers and sticker residue on the cover should be expected, as well as spine wear from use. There are NO codes or disc(s) included. All items ship Monday - Friday within 2-3 business days. Thank you for supporting Goodwill of OC See less

$3.99 delivery Wednesday, May 22. Details

Or fastest delivery May 17 - 21. Details

Select delivery location

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

$$11.59 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Enhancements you chose aren't available for this seller. Details

${cardName} not available for the seller you chose

${cardName} unavailable for quantities greater than ${maxQuantity}.

Ships from and sold by Goodwill of Orange County.

Other sellers on Amazon

New & Used (56) from $4.94 + $3.99 shipping

Follow the author

Annie Ernaux

+ Follow

More books from this author

Unboxing! Annie Ernaux: The Boxed Set Seven Stories Pr

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Color:

To view this video download Flash Player

VIDEO

A Man's Place Paperback – June 5, 2012

by Annie Ernaux (Author), Tanya Leslie (Translator), Francine Prose (Introduction)

4.3 440 ratings

See all formats and editions

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$11.59","priceAmount":11.59,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"11","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"59","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"t%2BUIr4TgZ1odxUdXkj5J%2B64LpAThzDXMY18MZWSfh5izjt1Tp9F19X2YfiJUxOo4798sJtWvjDIKdedlSMvTVeXN3gna6maQbIyrbtD7EsE7vVuWC6YkqG22q1nEeNLHEEHT1iiABEbS3go%2F0OF3SA%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$4.94","priceAmount":4.94,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"4","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"94","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"t%2BUIr4TgZ1odxUdXkj5J%2B64LpAThzDXMwUuTlMs2mn2gMHw%2FFtKBH6TRP3fZyUAeIPi3ozC9WJnPJXEOEOKXPirZQFGDmLqrvHPtSInzp6CXQJ7e36rl%2B2D8Yxj0I7R1vGjIMip8Hwogc7rO9xH9QWZttg2yseOFBu1OolYKexziX8C%2BKNIrhtmXNWWezf%2Bg","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

A New York Times Notable Book

Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection.

Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France.

Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world, while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously, even reluctantly admires. A Man's Place is the companion book to her critically acclaimed memoir about her mother, A Woman's Story.

Frequently bought together

$11.59

Get it as soon as Thursday, May 16

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

+

$8.95

Get it as soon as Thursday, May 16

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

+

$14.48

Get it as soon as Thursday, May 16

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Try again!

Details

Added to Cart

Choose items to buy together.

Annie Ernaux
495
Paperback
66 offers from $3.40
Annie Ernaux
1,401
Paperback
95 offers from $6.50
Annie Ernaux
685
Paperback
67 offers from $4.98
Annie Ernaux
906
Paperback
59 offers from $3.81
Annie Ernaux
181
Paperback
67 offers from $9.49
Annie Ernaux
126
Paperback
50 offers from $3.63

Popular Highlights in this book

What are popular highlights?

Maybe I am writing because we no longer had anything to say to each other.
Highlighted by 129 Kindle readers
Now I have finished taking possession of the legacy with which I had to part when I entered the educated, bourgeois world.
Highlighted by 119 Kindle readers
Crossing the bread, going to mass, attending Easter communion: religion, like hygiene, gave them a sense of dignity.
Highlighted by 86 Kindle readers

From the Publisher


	Happening	The Years	Getting Lost	A Girl's Story	Simple Passion	The Frozen Woman

Customer Reviews	685	1,401	485	331	906	126
Price	$12.53	$14.48	$11.99	$13.99	$9.35	$9.95
Description	Now an Award-Winning Film "'Happening' recounts what it was like to be a young woman whose life changed — and world ominously narrowed — in 1963 with an unwanted pregnancy....It feels urgently of the moment.” —The New York Times	A personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades of diaries. A masterpiece.	“[T]he story of a woman in the twentieth century who has lived fully, sought out pain and happiness equally and then committed her findings truthfully on paper. Her life is our inheritance." —The Guardian	“[N]ot a confession but a kind of personal epistemology. ... One way to read Ernaux’s book is as an attempt to understand that opaque, painful, essential process of ‘becoming.’” —The New Yorker	“[T]he little indignities and abjections of both obsession and abandonment—Ernaux tells with calm, almost tranquillized matter-of-factness [that] feels like determination, truth to self, clarity of purpose.” —Washington Post	“Annie Ernaux concisely charts telling moments during adolescence love, marriage, career, and motherhood …” —St. Louis Post Dispatch


	I Remain in Darkness	A Woman's Story	The Possession	Exteriors	A Man's Place	Shame
						See Details
Customer Reviews	84	495	99	93	440	—
Price	$11.95	$8.95	$10.80	$11.59	$11.59	—
Description	“Ernaux courageously bears witness both to complex multiple truths of family relationships and to the fierce persistence of family love.” —Washington Post	“[A] tender, tough and moving tribute to her mother's life and death. . . Ernaux attempts to explain—or, perhaps, merely to understand—the complex roots and blossoms of a mother/daughter relationship.” —Washington Times	A striking portrait of a woman after a love affair has ended. Annie Ernaux pulls the reader through every step of jealousy, of a woman’s need to know who has replaced her in a lost beloved’s life.	Taking the form of journal entries over the course of seven years, Exteriors concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person’s lived environment.	Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernau’s cold observation in A Man’s Place reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life.	“The careful, unflinching specificities of Shame give voice to a resonant and universal truth; and Ernaux's particular discomfort is, most profoundly, that of being human.”—New York Times Book Review


	The Young Man	I Will Write to Avenge My People	Annie Ernaux: The Boxed Set

Customer Reviews	166	19	3
Price	$9.40	$7.41	$94.37
Description	"Gripping. . . . Nobel prize winning writer Annie Ernaux’s recounts her fervent love affair with A., a man 30 years her junior." —Nylon	Published for the first time in a beautiful collectible edition, the essential lecture delivered by the 2022 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Annie Ernaux.	This boxed set includes 13 books written by 2022 Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux published by Seven Stories Press, plus a limited edition poster!

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A masterpiece … unlike any other contemporary writing … overwhelming.” –Paris-Match

“A fine literary success, vibrant with contained emotion and reserve.” –Le Monde

“'May I venture an explanation: writing is the ultimate recourse for those who have betrayed,' says Jean Genet in the epigraph to Ernaux's 'autobiographical narrative' about her relationship with her father. The betrayer is Ernaux herself, a cultivated intellectual whose bitter resentment towards her petit bourgeois parents first appeared in her novel Cleaned Out. The betrayed, of course, are her parents, without whose efforts the disparity in stations would not have existed. Although not as painfully immediate as Ernaux's depiction of her mother in A Woman's Story, this is nonetheless an affecting portrait of a man whose own peasant upbringing typified the adage that a child should never be better educated than his parents. Ernaux uses, as she says, 'no lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony,' but rather a dispassionate narrative to describe her father's climb to the relative prosperity of a shopkeeper in a small Norman town, and his fretful vigilance lest his manners, language, posture—or daughter—betray his uneasy social position.” –Publishers Weekly

“A companion to A Woman's Story, the biographical novel of Ernaux's mother, this work is a narrative of the life and death of her father. It is a story of a working-class man who believed that self-denial, hard work, and careful speech would gain him entrance into the middle class where good manners, well-spoken words, and respectability reigned. Ernaux tells the story without sentimentality, conveying the alienation and pain of the humiliating limitations of class. Possessing the honesty, perceptiveness, and universality in A Woman's Story and Cleaned Out, this book will make readers glad that Ernaux was able to unravel her suppressed memories, no longer surrendering to a world 'where memories of a lowly existence are seen as a sign of bad taste.'” –Library Journal

About the Author

Born in 1940, ANNIE ERNAUX grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and began teaching high school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, have become contemporary classics in France. She won the prestigious Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place when it was first published in French in 1984. The English edition was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The English edition of A Woman’s Story was a New York Times Notable Book.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Seven Stories Press (June 5, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 96 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1609804031
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1609804039
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.49 x 0.32 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #139,771 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,632 in Women's Biographies
- #4,471 in Memoirs (Books)
- #9,027 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.3 440 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Annie Ernaux

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

The author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, ANNIE ERNAUX is considered by many to be France’s most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for “A Man's Place” and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. More recently she received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for “The Years”, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Her other works include “Getting Lost,” “Exteriors,” “A Girl's Story”, “A Woman's Story,” “The Possession,” “Simple Passion,” “Happening,” “I Remain in Darkness,” “Shame,” “A Frozen Woman,” and “A Man's Place.”

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

440 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

BG

Masterfully written in simple words that evokes strong images and emotions

Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2024

Verified Purchase

Short in length but effective in conveying so much, I recommend this book. It is worthy of your time. Perhaps especially for anyone who went from a working class family to the good fortune of a university education, you likely will deeply feel Ernaux’s experience.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Hanan Yinnon

Quite nice but not worth a Nobel Price

Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2022

I read this book because one of the Swedish team members who announced that she won the Nobel price, said that "The Place" is her most recommended book.
Well, it is a nice, quite insightful book describing her father as a typical simple country-side French man. She portrays well his inferiority complex as a simple man in a rapidly changing world.
However, this is not Nobel price material. It may be that her other books are better, but this simple book is not worth it.
I recommend it to people interested in exploring their relationship with their father.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

kayleh settie

Lovely

Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2023

Verified Purchase

I absolutely adore this book. It’s short and a wonderful read. I definitely think any/ all college students, especially first generation students, should read this book.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Pam

Just OK

Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2023

Verified Purchase

In fact, a little boring. No doubt the author is an excellent writer, but the story was uninteresting. I was glad it was a short read.

Helpful

Vegasrebel

A beautiful short memoir.

Reviewed in the United States on January 15, 2023

Verified Purchase

This enjoyable memoir depicts a father as seen by his daughter. She describes his presence in her life without judging him or putting him on pedestal. Her love for him is obvious, it is sublime and melancholic. Reminds you of the good old days when life was simple, serene, and happy.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Bill

Familiar Memories

Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2023

Even though I lived on a different continent at a different time, I often had to stop reading to get past the memories and feelings she evoked. A very powerful and important story.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Dennis Littrell

A stylistic tour de force

Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2001

This thin book contains a "fiction"--it is shorter than a novella, but somewhat long for a short story. Perhaps one might call it a fictionalized memoir. In experience and scope it is a novel, that is, after one has read the lean 99 pages, one feels that one has experienced an entire life, such is the effect of Ernaux's distinctive prose. She writes: "I shall collate my father's words, tastes and mannerisms, as well as the main events of his life...No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral style of writing comes to me naturally." (p. 13)
This book, and the companion volume, A Woman's Story, was a best seller in France and has become part of the national culture. What Ernaux has done and does so well is to bring to vivid reality the mundane details of the small town life of twentieth century France. Her style is deliberately "flat" without any striving for effect. There is no satire, and as she intends, no irony, no higher view; indeed the nameless first person narrator, whom the reader must take as Ernaux herself, makes no effort to romanticize any aspect of her story including the part she herself plays. She reveals herself as a creature of her culture and her class just as surely as her father was.
She is a secondary school teacher, apparently in her thirties, something of an incipient intellectual, with a two and a half year old son and a husband who also has nothing in common with her unschooled father. The story begins when her father's death at age sixty-seven goads her into recalling his life and her relationship with him. They are two people joined in blood but apart in both a social and a temporal sense. And this distance is part of what she explores. She speaks of something "indefinable," that had come between them during her adolescence, "something to do with class...Like fractured love." Perhaps we might call it the alienation of generations. He was proud of her because she was accepted by those who would not accept him. She had risen from the working class to the middle class, just as he had risen above his father's station as an illiterate peasant.
There are some intriguing curiosities. For one, the blurb identifies Ernaux as having grown up in the small town of Yvetot, while the narrative uses the quaint transparency "Y-" to identify the town, as though this were a roman a clef. For another, there is a sense of something resembling warmth between her and her father, but no more than that, and this "distance" is never really accounted for except as some inexplicable fact of life. Also, Ernaux's narrator thinks of herself as bourgeois and having risen above the station of her working class parents, yet they are totally bourgeois themselves; indeed more so that she, since they own their simple cafe and store and adjoining property in the small town, while she is the equivalent of a civil servant, her education paid for by the state so that she could be employed by the state. This ingenuous self-revelation persuades us of her honesty and guilelessness and lends a queer sort of very deep veracity to her story.
I will not call this a masterpiece, although I think all writers of fiction ought to read it for the magic of its style. She has quite a nice touch, without artificiality, without contrivance.
Tanya Leslie's translation of the French, often tested because of the large number of idioms used by Ernaux, is natural and very agreeable.

16 people found this helpful

Helpful

Darren Haber

Beautiful memoir.

Reviewed in the United States on March 22, 2019

Riveting , honest and beautifully written. A superb writer’s unadorned remembrance of her father’s life, and the quiet but poignant way he supported her emancipation from an intellectually limiting “blue collar “ life, the world of her father. In the end it is a work of deep love and a way of grieving.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Cliente Amazon

Strong and beautiful

Reviewed in Brazil on April 8, 2024

Verified Purchase

.

Sally J

A book for female readers

Reviewed in Germany on January 27, 2023

Verified Purchase

Very enjoyable but more for women than for men. Still not convinced that Annie Ernaux's writing is really up to scratch for a Nobel Prize winner....

Customer

Decisively a deserving Nobel

Reviewed in India on January 27, 2023

Verified Purchase

An emotionally detached pen-portrait of father by the daughter, his life and struggle is beautifully described in a hundred page book. And yet, one can see behind the story, the daughter's concern and attachment. The book should be read along with the companion book on the mother " A Woman's story".

One person found this helpful

Sapiens

Boring, boring, boring

Reviewed in Spain on October 9, 2022

Verified Purchase

Superficial description of an ordinary person. No introspection or emotional intelligence. A boring biography that should not have been published at all.

Amazon Customer

This edition has a typo in the first paragraph!

Reviewed in Australia on November 11, 2022

Verified Purchase

Look, the book written by Ernaux is beautiful, so this is in no way a review of her writing. But the book that I was sent has a number of problems. The worst of course is that there is a glaring typo in the first paragraph of the book "..A new lycee, with potted in the buildings..." (should be potted plants).
Second, the book is bound badly, so that the spine is slightly bent.
and finally, the book's cover isn't the same as pictured on the website (see my photo).
Probably i got ripped off by someone selling me a dodgy remainder copy instead of the one I ordered - I was too busy to look at it as soon as it was delivered, and by the time I got around to it the return date had expired.

One person found this helpful

See more reviews

Return this item for free

Follow the author

Image Unavailable