Madame: A Novel

by Antoni Libera (Author), Agnieszka Kolakowska (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $11.51

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $9.38

  Set in gloomy Soviet-controlled Poland, yet sparkling with light and warmth, Madame is a story of adolescence with which many will identify. The novel's hero - a precocious, talented and hugely likeable schoolboy - falls hopelessly under the spell of his elegant and mysterious French teacher. Bewitched with her glacial beauty and cool intelligence, he resolves to learn everything he can about her. And, ultimately, to win her heart. In a sequence of marvellously funny, but sobering manoeuvres, he finds out much more than he expected - about politics, Poland and the Spanish Civil War, and about his own family's shrouded past. His quest allows him to take his first steps to liberation as an artist; but can he ensnare the elusive Madame?

• New

  Paperback
  2004

  $13.14

  Madame tells the story of a self-absorbed Polish teenager as he pursues intellectual maturity, and the woman of his dreams, his French teacher 'Madame', in the communist-dominated Warsaw of the early 1970s. Libera paces his exuberant young hero's fulminations, fantasies and discoveries beautifully, building a remarkably subtle characterisation of a free mind in a repressive culture. This is one of those rare novels which reminds us why we love books. A consummate literary entertainment.