A Romance of Youth — Volume 2

The tender ache of becoming yourself. Amedee Violette is nineteen, poor but ambitious, hovering on the precipice of literary dreams and adult disappointment. His closest friend is the golden Maurice Roger, whose easy charm and comfortable fortune make Amedee acutely aware of every boundary class has drawn around him. When Maurice invites him to dinner, Amedee tastes a world that feels both irresistible and unbearable: warmth, plenty, belonging he has never known. Back home, his father's health fails. Love for young Maria Gerard flickers, complicated by everything he cannot offer, everything he is not yet. This is a story about the particular cruelty of wanting what hovers just beyond reach, and the more particular grace of friendships that survive that wanting. Coppée renders middle-class Parisian youth with an eye that is unsentimental yet aching, capturing that liminal moment when youth ends not with a single blow but with a thousand small reckonings.