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 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 his tragic
death at the age of twenty. Expressing all the anguish and joy of adolescence,
it is a work of startling imagery and subtle beauty. This Penguin Modern
Classics edition includes an introduction by Fay Weldon.
Author Biography
Raymond Radiguet was born near Paris on 18th June 1903. He dropped out of his
lycee in order to pursue his interests in journalism and literature, and
associated himself with the Modernist set, befriending Picasso, Max Jacob, Jean
Hugo, Juan Gris and especially Jean Cocteau, who became his mentor. His first
novel, Le Diable au corps, was published in 1923 and became a runaway
bestseller in France. Radiguet died of typhoid fever the same year, at the age
of twenty. His second novel, Le bal du Comte d'Orgel was published posthumously
in 1924. Fay Weldon was born in 1931 and grew up in New Zealand. Her work
includes over twenty novels, five collections of short stories, several
children's books, non-fiction books, magazine articles, a memoir and a number
of plays written for television, radio and the stage.