Description

The definitive translation of one of the greatest French novels of the twentieth century

In the opening volume of Proust’s great novel, the narrator travels backwards in time in order to tell the story of a love affair that had taken place before his own birth. Swann’s jealous love for Odette provides a prophetic model of the narrator’s own relationships. All Proust’s great themes – time and memory, love and loss, art and the artistic vocation – are here in kernel form.

‘Surely the greatest novelist of the 20th century’ Telegraph

Publisher Review

"My advice is to plunge straight into Volume 1, Swann's Way there are many who swear the experience has permanently enriched their lives" * Daily Mail * "One of the cornerstones of the Western literary canon" * The Times * "Surely the greatest novelist of the 20th century" * Sunday Telegraph * "As close to being a definitive English version of the great novel as we are likely to get" * Scotsman * "Proust isn't just the most profound of novelists, but the most entertaining, too. No reader ever forgets his most killingly funny scenes... Proust sinks deepest in readers because the book is so exhaustively analytical, so ceaselessly truthful. Not the least of it is the book's heavenly length, so that it inevitably takes over your life for a long stretch... the experience of reading it becomes, in itself, an unforgettable thing" * Independent *