November

Wrestling with the agony of loneliness, a young man withdraws deeper into himself, believing he has now reached the autumn of his life.

His increasing hopelessness gives way to a yearning for romance - surely the love of a woman can give him the purpose he so craves?

Convinced of the truth of this, he visits Marie, a kind-hearted prostitute - yet Marie, too, is starved of love and longs for acceptance.

Together they form a tragic portrait of personal anguish, and provide the basis for Flaubert's extraordinary outpouring of romantic longing and the precursor to his later novels. 'Flaubert's novella is an unsurpassed testament of adolescence.' - from the Foreword by Nadine Gordimer