From the French intellectual, novelist, essayist, critic, and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century: the second volume of Proust's monumental achievement Remembrance of Things Past , collecting The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain. In C. K. Scott Moncrieff's heralded original English translation, as revised by Terence Kilmartin based on the definitive French Pléiade edition. Marcel Proust's masterpiece is one of the towering literary works of the twentieth century. Relating its narrator's experiences in Belle Epoque France as he grows up, falls in love, and lives through the First World War, it has mesmerized generations of readers with its profound reflections on art, time, and memory.

One of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time Vol. 1: The Way by Swann's is published in a new translation from the French by Lydia Davis in Penguin Classics. The Way by Swann's is one of the great novels of childhood, depicting the impressions of a sensitive boy of his family and neighbours, brought dazzlingly back to life by the famous taste of a madeleine . It contains the separate short novel, A Love of Swann's , a study of sexual jealousy that forms a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of In Search of Lost Time . This book established Proust as one of the greatest voices of the modern age - satirical, sceptical, confiding and endlessly varied in his responses to the human condition. Since the original pre-war translation Remembrance of Things Past by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, there has been no completely new rendering of Proust's French original into English. This translation brings to the fore a more sharply engaged, comic and lucid Proust. As the great story unfolds from its magical opening scenes to its devastating end, it is this Penguin Classics edition of In Search of Lost Time that makes Proust accessible to a new generation. Marcel Proust (1871-1922) is generally viewed as the greatest French novelist and perhaps the greatest European novelist of the 20th century. He lived much of his later life as a reclusive semi-invalid in a sound-proofed flat in Paris, giving himself over entirely to writing his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) . If you enjoyed In Search Of Lost Time , you might like James Joyce's Ulysses , also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'The latest Penguin Proust is a triumph, and will bring this inexhaustible artwork to new audiences throughout the English-speaking world' Sunday Telegraph

In The Captive, Proust's narrator is living with Albertine in his mother's Paris apartment. He is chronically concerned about who she may or may not love. In The Fugitive, Albertine is irretrievably lost to him, and he retreats to Venice, where he receives a telegram from Gilberte, Swann's red-haired daughter. Rich with irony, the story inspires meditations on desire, homosexuality, music, and the art of introspection. The final volume of a new, definitive text of A la recherche du temps perdu was published by the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade in 1989. For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to take into account the new French editions.