Annie Ernaux’s investigation into the life of her mysterious older sister, who  died at six, two years before Annie was born. In the summer of 1950, when Annie Ernaus, the French authors was ten, she inadvertently overheard her mother tell an acquaintance that, before Anne’s birth, the family had another daughter who died of diphtheria at the age of six. It was kept a secret from little Anne so as not to upset her. Having believed she was an only child, she learns that she has replaced another daughter- “the little saint,” “the absent one in every conversation,” who lives on in Annie’s parents’ wordless grief. When she grew up, she started thinking the dead sister might be the reason she became a writer.

Taking the form of a letter to the unknown sister, The Other Girl was published in French in 2011 as part of the Affranchis collection ( published by les éditions du Nil), which invited writers to compose “the letter they’d never written,” inspired by Kafka’s letter to His Father. “ I had to come to terms with this mysterious inconsistency: you,  the good girl, were not saved, but I, the demon, survived. More than survived, was miraculously saved. So you had to die at six for me to come to into the world and be saved.”

The Other Girl by the 2022 Nobel Laureate appears now for the first time in an English language version, adding a necessary and wondrous piece to the great and ongoing puzzle that is the oeuvre of one of our greatest living writers, Annie Ernaux.

The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L Strayer, Fitzcarraldo £8.99, 64 pages.