by Robert Baldick (Translator), Raymond Radiguet (Author)
As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair is beginning between a sixteen-year-old boy and a young woman married to a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on the outskirts of Paris, in cornfields and on river banks. When she receives letters from her husband, they burn them together. Intoxicated by passion, they cannot bear to end their affair, even when it causes a scandal among their friends and neighbours. Instead, they can only hurtle towards tragedy.
Written in spare, haunting prose when Raymond Radiguet was still a teenager, this semi-autobiographical novel became an instant bestseller and its author was hailed as a genius, before dying tragically at the age of twenty. Expressing all the anguish and joy of adolescence, it is a work of startling imagery and subtle beauty.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 160
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published: 07 Mar 2019
ISBN 10: 0241372615
ISBN 13: 9780241372616
Book Overview: One of the most startling literary debuts of all time, now in Penguin Black Classics.