Fitzcarraldo Editions

What is it like to live with chronic insomnia? In Sleepless, Marie Darrieussecq recounts her own experiences alongside those of fellow insomniacs, writers and artists including Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras and Franz Kafka.

Long considered one of Simone de Beauvoir's masterpieces, a profoundly moving recounting of her mother's death.

Drawing from personal experience, Despentes shatters received ideas about rape and prostitution, and explodes common attitudes about sex and gender. KING KONG THEORY is a manifesto for a new punk feminism, reissued here in a brilliant new translation by Frank Wynne.

SUPPOSE A SENTENCE is a critical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature.

Written as a series of linked essays, interwoven with a reflection on affinity itself, Affinities completes a trilogy, with Essayism and Suppose a Sentence, about the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking.

A work of fiction about being a stranger in your own family and life. Both parents are deaf but couldn't be more different. Into this unlikely yet somehow inevitable union, our narrator is born and comes of age in this strange, and increasingly estranged, household split between a small village in southern Italy and New York City.

A rich and vivid novel about Michelangelo in Constantinople from the 'mesmerizing' (NEW YORKER) and 'masterful' (WASHINGTON POST) author of COMPASS.

As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life as an Orientalist.

Brimming with Mathias Enard's characteristic wit and encyclopaedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild is a riotous novel set in western France, where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess.

'My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.' Thus begins Shame, the probing story of the twelve-year-old girl who will become Annie Ernaux, and the traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life.

In her latest work, Annie Ernaux recounts a relationship with a student thirty years her junior - an experience that transforms her, briefly, back into the 'scandalous girl' of her youth. At once stark and tender, The Young Man is a taut encapsulation of Ernaux's relationship to time, memory and writing.

At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is 'a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism' (New York Times), a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.