Annie Ernaux: Queen of the Suburbs

Think Milton Keynes, with touches of Harlow, Stevenage or Crawley. Its location in relation to the capital, though, plants the town closer to Watford, even Slough. You might just about imagine a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature growing up in a place like that. Still, for a laureate to choose such an address and then stay there willingly for almost half a century would bemuse, if not appal, the smarter sort of literary mind.