Great Meaulnes: A New Translation

At seventeen, Augustin Meaulnes arrives at a remote country school in central France and transforms the quiet world of fifteen-year-old François Seurel. Tall, charismatic, and restless, Meaulnes becomes "le Grand Meaulnes"-the great Meaulnes-to his awestruck classmates.

Then, one winter evening, he disappears.

Lost in the countryside, Meaulnes stumbles upon an extraordinary gathering at a half-forgotten château-a dreamlike fête where children in costume dance through candlelit halls, and where he encounters Yvonne de Galais, a young woman who will haunt him for the rest of his life. In that single enchanted night, he discovers something he can never fully name or reclaim: a realm of perfect beauty, innocence, and possibility.

What follows is an obsessive quest to return to that lost domain, to find Yvonne again, and to recapture the transcendent moment when everything seemed possible. But the distance between adolescent dreams and adult realities proves devastating-and some paradises, once lost, can never be recovered.

Published in 1913, a year before Alain-Fournier's death in the First World War, Le Grand Meaulnes remains one of French literature's most beloved novels. John Fowles called it "the greatest novel of adolescence in European literature"-a haunting meditation on first love, lost innocence, and the painful passage from youth to adulthood.

This edition presents Alain-Fournier's only completed novel in clear, contemporary English that preserves the dreamlike beauty of his prose.