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Annie Ernaux, the 2022 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is perhaps best known for her deeply intimate and unflinchingly honest approach to personal recollection. This quality is on full display in The Young Man, a slim but powerful memoir about the brief and heated love affair she had with a former student who was 30 years her junior. Brimming with life, vulnerability, and unfettered feeling, Ernaux’s writing is a daring call to live unbounded by convention, answering only to freedom and desire. —Cady Lang
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