The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes)

First new English translation since 1959 by acclaimed translator Robin Buss

The Lost Estate is Robin Buss's translation of Henri Alain-Fournier's poignant study of lost love, Le Grand Meaulnes. 
 
'I read it for the first time when I was seventeen and loved every page. I find its depiction of a golden time and place just as poignant now as I did then' Nick Hornby 
 
When Meaulnes first arrives at the local school in Sologne, everyone is captivated by his good looks, daring and charisma. But when Meaulnes disappears for several days, and returns with tales of a strange party at a mysterious house - and his love for the beautiful girl hidden within it, Yvonne de Galais - his life has been changed forever. In his restless search for his Lost Estate and the happiness he found there, Meaulnes, observed by his loyal friend Francois, may risk losing everything he ever had. Poised between youthful admiration and adult resignation, Alain-Fournier's compelling narrator carries the reader through this evocative and unbearably poignant portrayal of desperate friendship and vanished adolescence. 
 
Robin Buss's translation of Le Grand Meaulnes sensitively and accurately renders Alain-Fournier's poetically charged, expressive and deceptively simple style. In his introduction, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik discusses the life of Alain-Fournier, who was killed in the First World War after writing this, his only novel. 
 
If you liked Le Grand Meaulnes, you might enjoy Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education, also available in Penguin Classics.

Alain-Fournier, christened Henri Alban, was born in La Chapelle d'Angillon (Cher) in 1886, the son of a country school-master. He was educated at Brest and in Paris, where he met and fell in love with the original Yvonne, who influenced his whole life and work. The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) was published in 1912. Les Miracles appeared posthumously in 1924. Alain-Fournier's important correspondence with Jacques Rivière and his letters to his family were published in 1926 and 1930 respectively. Alain-Fournier was killed in action on the Meuse in 1914. 
 
 
Robin Buss is a writer and translator who works for the Independent on Sunday and as television critic for The Times Educational Supplement. He is part-author of the article 'French Literature' in Encyclopaedia Britannica and has published critical studies of works by Vigny and Cocteau, and three books on European cinema, The French Through Their Films (1988), Italian Films (1989) and French Film Noir (1994). He has also translated a number of volumes for Penguin Classics. 
Adam Gopnik is a New Yorker staff writer and author of the recently published Paris To The Moon.

When Meaulnes first arrives at the local school in Sologne, everyone is captivated by his good looks, daring and charisma. But when Meaulnes disappears for several days, and returns with tales of a strange party at a mysterious house and a beautiful girl hidden within it, he has been changed forever. In his restless search for his Lost Estate and the happiness he found there, Meaulnes, observed by his loyal friend Francois, may risk losing everything he ever had. Poised between youthful admiration and adult resignation, Alain-Fournier's compelling narrator carries the reader through this evocative and unbearably poignant portrayal of desperate friendship and vanished adolescence.

Henri Alain-Fournier

Valerie Lester

It has captured the hearts, and fantasies, of generations of adolescents and lingered on their bookshelves, and in their souls, well into middle age...a tale of enchantment. It is, above all, a fairy tale, one imbued with the beauties of the French countryside, an eerie, charged nostalgia and all the yearnings of the budding Bohemian soul

A bewitching tale of adolescence, love, adventure and the mysterious spaces in between

One of the most romantic, elegiac novels of adolescence ever written...resounds with not only the unfulfilled promise of the writer and his fictional alter ego but also that of a generation

It is an extraordinary book, part fairytale or romance, part realistic study of French provincial life, sometimes grim, in the last years of the 19th century; and some of its fascination comes from this curiously hybrid quality. It is both naive and knowing. It has the dewy freshness of a first novel, but it is also admirably constructed

Intense, perfectly capturing that interval between childhood and the adult world

When Augustin Meaulnes arrives in François' home, he changes everything. Life in the little town where they both go to school suddenly becomes far more adventurous and exciting. On one of his escapades, Meaulnes gets lost in the countryside finds himself at an extraordinary party where he meets the girl of his dreams. From this point on he is haunted by her memory and devotes his life, with François' willing help, to finding her again.

Henri Alain-Fournier

Praise for The Magnificent Meaulnes (Le Grand Meaulnes)

It has captured the hearts, and fantasies, of generations of adolescents and lingered on their bookshelves, and in their souls, well into middle age...a tale of enchantment. It is, above all, a fairy tale, one imbue ...

A bewitching tale of adolescence, love, adventure and the mysterious spaces in between

One of the most romantic, elegiac novels of adolescence ever written...resounds with not only the unfulfilled promise of the writer and his fictional alter ego but also that of a generation

It has captured the hearts, and fantasies, of generations of adolescents and lingered on their bookshelves, and in their souls, well into middle age...a tale of enchantment. It is, above all, a fairy tale, one imbue ...

A bewitching tale of adolescence, love, adventure and the mysterious spaces in between

One of the most romantic, elegiac novels of adolescence ever written...resounds with not only the unfulfilled promise of the writer and his fictional alter ego but also that of a generation

It has captured the hearts, and fantasies, of generations of adolescents and lingered on their bookshelves, and in their souls, well into middle age...a tale of enchantment. It is, above all, a fairy tale, one imbue ...

A bewitching tale of adolescence, love, adventure and the mysterious spaces in between

One of the most romantic, elegiac novels of adolescence ever written...resounds with not only the unfulfilled promise of the writer and his fictional alter ego but also that of a generation

Books by Henri Alain-Fournier

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