<p>In <i>Exteriors</i> Annie Ernaux concentrates not on the essential details of a relationship with a family member or lover as before but on ephemeral encounters within the larger circle of one's environment and the hundreds of strangers who inhabit it. Here she captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of a great city: tortured chaotic lyrical and powerfully alive. Exteriors is in many ways the most ecstatic of Ernaux's books the first in which she appears largely free of the haunting personal relationships she has written about so powerfully elsewhere the first in which she is able to leave her past behind.</p>