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Claudine's House
  • Published: 8 September 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241574690
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

Claudine's House

Formats & editions
Paperback
8 Sept 2026
EBook
4 June 2026
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Colette's irresistible depiction of a childhood in rural France, in a lush new translation by Belinda Jack

‘I was an independent, stray dog who answered to no one…’

Claudine lives in a large house with a rose-filled garden and a vegetable patch smelling of tomato leaves and apricots. Beyond her house is the village, where travelling performers stop for the night and wedding feasts take place under a bright summer moon. Inside her house are Mama, who loves animals, and Papa, who lost his leg in the war, and a library full of forbidden and irresistible books...

Based on Colette’s own early life, Claudine’s House is a rich and enchanting depiction of childhood, animals, flowers, trees, books, families and love in late-nineteenth-century France.
  • Published: 8 September 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241574690
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

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Praise for Claudine's House

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

New York Times Book Review

Her prose is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious and utterly beautiful

Vogue

Brilliant, a novelist who prized the body over the mind… [her novels offer a] devastating portrait of beauty, seduction and the ravages of time

Michael LaPointe, The New Yorker

France’s foremost woman of letters …[although] she did not invent the Modern French Woman in fiction, [she supplied] the organs, the accuracies, the mind and the heart

TIME