Books like A Man's Place
Ernaux writes about her father, a labourer who became the owner of a café-grocery in Normandy, and the distance her education put between them.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of A Man's Place
A Woman's Story
Written after her mother's death, Ernaux's portrait of her mother, a factory girl who became a shopkeeper and wanted her daughter to rise.
Shame
Ernaux begins from a Sunday in June 1952 when her father tried to kill her mother, and reconstructs the world of the twelve-year-old girl she was.
Boyhood
Coetzee's account, written in the third person, of a boy growing up in Worcester, a provincial town in the Cape, in the late 1940s and early 50s.
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Seven weeks after his mother killed herself, Handke wrote this compact account of her life to keep her from vanishing into the ordinary.
The Return
Hisham Matar goes back to Libya after Qaddafi's fall, more than thirty years after his family left, to find out what happened to his father, a dissident who disappeared into a Tripoli prison.
Blue Nights
In the aftermath of her daughter Quintana's death, Didion turns the pale light of late summer on her own motherhood, her own failing body, and what it means to be the last one left.
The Year of Magical Thinking
After her husband's sudden death and her daughter's hospitalisation, Didion keeps a forensic record of what magical thinking her grief conjures and what it refuses to.
Abandoning a Cat
A short memoir of Murakami's father, a teacher drafted into the war in China, that starts from a childhood afternoon when the two of them left a cat at the beach and found it waiting at home.
The Words
Sartre's account of his childhood to the age of eleven in his grandfather's Paris apartment, among books, and how he decided to become a writer.
Dora Bruder
Modiano comes across a notice in a December 1941 newspaper asking for news of a missing fifteen-year-old Jewish girl in Paris, and spends years trying to trace her.
Down and Out in Paris and London
Orwell's account of being broke in the late 1920s, washing dishes in the steaming basement of a Paris hotel and tramping between London's casual wards with the homeless men of England.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Murakami reflects on decades of long-distance running and what the discipline has taught him about writing, ageing, and pain.