Experts attribute the phenomenom to a growth in middle-class cafe society, peer pressure and the new assertiveness of young women in a country where it is not all that common to see a woman smoking a cigarette in public.
Ernaux's books embody a woman's life: the small-town working-class cafe and grocery run by her parents, in Normandy, in the years after World War II; an icy marriage; a back-alley abortion; the death of her parents; and so on.
The BBC has been told the libraries will be located in key areas and become "community hubs" - incorporating information technology, adult learning classes, cafes and business support services.
It had a restaurant car, an old-fashioned one with the agreeable austerity of a third-class station cafe about it: brown wooden walls and seats, bare tables unless you ordered the highest-price lunch, and a few faded advertisements for Aspirina Bayer and 'Visitez le Maroc ' permanently crooked above the windows.
Now a buzzy shopping, eating and entertainment zone, it has also become the darling of the city's creative class, its cafes and bars filled with iPad-toting media execs, black-clad fashion designers and bespectacled actors.
Site Gallery, Sheffield, Sat to 14 Jan The impressionists frequented places where they could paint modern middle-class pleasure: cafes by the Seine, gardens, the beaches of Normandy and... Manchester?
Like the existing Acela trains, the new ones will have business-class cars, a cafe car, a first-class car and a quiet car, where the use of cellphones is discouraged.
One recurring motif in the book is Jones sitting down with a disgruntled member of the political class in the cafe of Portcullis House to have pointed out to him all the frantic lobbying and backscratching going on around them.
People,specially adults, will notice how amazingly different you are from everyone else! Try sitting very still while sitting in class, in the cafe, or on a bench, and looking straight ahead, as if in deep thought.
