Le Grand Meaulnes

In a quiet provincial boarding school in turn-of-the-century France, fifteen-year-old François Seurel's ordered life shatters with the arrival of Augustin Meaulnes: a seventeen-year-old with burning eyes and a restless soul who seems to have stepped out of a fever dream. Meaulnes draws François into his orbit, and together they embark on adventures that blur the line between the possible and the impossible. But when Meaulnes stumbles upon a mysterious estate during a truant expedition and falls wildly in love with Yvonne de Galais, he loses both her and the way back. What follows is a beautiful, devastating portrait of obsession, as Meaulnes spends years searching for that lost paradise while François remains his devoted, bewildered witness. Written by Alain-Fournier, who died in the first month of World War I, the novel pulses with the particular ache of youth: the terror that the ideal is real but unreachable, and the suspicion that adulthood will be a long diminishing. It endures because it captures the precise moment when childhood ends, and we realize the world is larger, stranger, and lonelier than we imagined.