In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is Marcel Proust’s spectacular dissection of male and female adolescence. The narrative is charged with the narrator’s memories of Paris and the Normandy seaside.

At the heart of the story lies his relationships with his grandmother and with the Swann family. As a meditation on different forms of love, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower has no equal. Here, Proust introduces some of his greatest comic inventions, from the magnificently dull M. de Norpois to the enchanting Robert de Saint-Loup.

It is memorable as well for the first appearance of the two figures who are to dominate the narrator’s life—the Baron de Charlus and the mysterious Albertine.