The Lover

Winner of the 1984 Prix Goncourt. “At last,” Marguerite Duras would say, thirty-four years after The Sea Wall had failed to win the prize in 1950.

The Lover is a novel of revelation. In colonial Indochina in the 1930s, a poor fifteen-and-a-half-year-old French girl begins an affair with a wealthy Chinese heir. Drawn from Duras’s own youth, the story transcends autobiography through a prose at once restrained and intensely charged, swift and haunting—a language which, she insisted, should be “read aloud.”

The novel was an immediate phenomenon. The initial 25,000 copies sold within five days, and 100,000 in less than three weeks, even before the book appeared on the Goncourt shortlists. Reprints followed in rapid succession, while American publishers competed for the translation rights. The Lover soon reached a worldwide readership, was translated into dozens of languages, and was adapted for the screen by Jean-Jacques Annaud in 1992.

A superb binding by Louise Bescond, her first interpretation of this text. Its abstract landscape of reeds and water, in shades of jade green and sand, evokes Indochina and the banks of the Mekong—the river at the heart of the novel’s defining scene, where the young girl, crossing by ferry, first encounters the Chinese lover.

An important copy of Duras’s most celebrated novel, combining the rare first issue on Arches paper with a contemporary artistic interpretation of its central landscape.

Courtesy of Hugo Julliot