Cheri

Colette is a kind of corsetiere of love. This most French of all French writers tells us how love sometimes binds and keeps a woman from breathing freely or how it may shape and support her and help her to be beautiful . . . One thinks of her as the female voice of Paris . . . It's as if all the house fronts of Paris were cut away and we could see men and women talking, dressing, brooding, loving

Anatole Broyard, New York Times

Everything that Colette touched became human... She was a complete sensualist; but she gave herself up to her senses with such delicacy of perception, with such exquisiteness of physical pain as well as physical ecstasy, that she ennobled sensualism almost to grandeur

The Times

Sumptuous

Time

A perfectionist in her every word

Spectator

Her sensual prose style made her one of the great writers of twentieth-century France

New York Times

The paradoxes of great literature are those of human nature, and Colette is nothing if not human . . . Accessible and elusive; greedy and austere; courageous and timid; subversive and complacent; scorchingly honest and sublimely mendacious; an inspired consoler and an existential pessimist—these are the qualities of the artist and the woman. It is time to rediscover them

Judith Thurman, biographer of Colette

She has been compared to a 20th-century female Montaigne, and it is true that her books offer a manual on how to live fearlessly and joyfully – greedily alive to every sensation and experience

Lisa Allardice, Guardian

A perpetual feast to the reader. Her prose is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious and utterly beautiful

Raymond Mortimer

Vintage has republished this classic from Colette that was first published in 1920 and it still sparkles and teases

The Connexion

Her writing is as sensuous and acute as it is unsentimental... Very beautiful and subtle... I feel more alive when I read her

Helen Simpson, Guardian

I devoured Chéri at a gulp. What a wonderful subject and with what intelligence, mastery and understanding of the least-admitted secrets of the flesh

André Gide