Annie Ernaux’s The Other Girl might be the latest of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s works to be published by Fitzcarraldo, but it is far from her most recent. The Other Girl , translated into English for the first time by Alison L Strayer, was first published in French in 2011.

It is a letter to Ernaux’s dead sister, whose life and tragic death was a poorly kept secret by Erneaux’s parents; one which she discovered by overhearing a conversation between her mother and a relative stranger. In some ways The Other Girl is reminiscent of Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts , as it shares a curiosity for family members that the author never knew, while demonstrating grief ’s rippling effects. 

Ernaux, with her carefully selected words, questions whether her sister, who family members hav

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