Raymond Radiguet

One of the most startling literary debuts of all time, now in Penguin Black Classics. As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair begins 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...

In this novel of desire, possession and perdition, an unnamed adolescent narrator meets the slightly older Marthe in Paris at the start of the First World War when her husband-to-be is away at the Front. The narrator is at a loose end—precocious and apathetic, he has given up school, and in the general chaos of wartime, no occupation has been...