Penguin Books Australia

With a new Introduction by
Fay Weldon

'A masterpiece' 
Jean Cocteau

As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair is beginning between a sixteen-year-old boy and the young wife of a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on the outskirts of Paris, in cornfields and on river banks. When she receives letters from her husband, they burn them together. Intoxicated by passion, they cannot bear to end their affair, even when it causes a scandal. Instead, they can only hurtle towards tragedy.

Written in spare, haunting prose when Raymond Radiguet was still a teenager, this semi-autobiographical novel became an instant bestseller and its author was hailed as a genius, before dying tragically at the age of twenty. Expressing all the anguish and joy of adolescence, it is a work of startling imagery and subtle beauty. 

'So assured that one wonders how he would have written in maturity' 
Guardian