The Charterhouse of Parma

Author	Gustave Flaubert
ISBN	0192840398

'Oh, why, dear God, did I marry him?'

Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent devourer of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending...

Author	Marcel Proust
ISBN	0142437964

Swann's Way tells two related stories, the first of which revolves around Marcel, a younger version of the narrator, and his experiences in, and memories of, the French town Combray. Inspired by the "gusts of memory" that rise up within him as he dips a Madeleine into hot tea, the narrator discusses his...

Author	Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
ISBN	0192838679

The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. The subject of major film and stage adaptations, the novel's prime movers, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil,...

Author	Honoré de Balzac
ISBN	0140442375

The novel begins in 1792 with a long and rather dull preamble givinge history to the Rouget family, and as it happens this is vital to understanding the last part of the tale. Agathe Rouget is the daughter of a rather nasty doctor, that seems to be putting it mildly, and Balzac laces the tale of Doctor Rouget...

Author	Gustave Flaubert
ISBN	0140447970

Based on Flaubert’s own youthful passion for an older woman, Sentimental Education was described by its author as “the moral history of the men of my generation.” It follows the amorous adventures of Frederic Moreau, a law student who, returning home to Normandy from Paris, notices Mme Arnoux,...

Author	Honoré de Balzac
ISBN	0140442324

Why should anyone care about Esther, a prostitute from a young age, a harlot with powers over men? Why should anyone care about a spoiled feeble individual such as Lucien, the poet whose ambitions are to secure a noble title and live in luxury for the rest of his life? The same Lucien who, by the way, in Lost...

Author	Honoré de Balzac
ISBN	1406951242

Les Chouans (French pronunciation: ​[le ʃwɑ̃], The Chouans) is an 1829 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) and included in the Scènes de la vie militaire section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine. Set in the French region of Brittany, the novel combines...

Author	Guy de Maupassant
ISBN	0543898466

Pierre, médecin, ne comprend pas pourquoi un ami de sa famille a légué sa fortune à Jean, son frère cadet. Au terme d'une véritable enquête policière, il mettra au jour un terrible secret. Le quatrième roman de Maupassant (1850-1893), publié en 1888, est sans doute le meilleur. Le récit,...