"Magnificent. I insist everyone reads Adam Thorpe's new translation" (Vogue)

"The most scandalous novel of all time" (Playboy)

"Flaubert's 1856 novel begins with marriage and what follows is the archetypal tale of a desperate housewife" (Daily Telegraph)

"?Thorpe's new translation of Madame Bovary is to die for?" (Independent)

"[Thorpe?s] hard work has yielded beauty. The rhythms are perfectly judged, unexpected enough to make the reader attend to every word" (Robert Chandler, TLS)

The Vintage Classics Europeans series - with covers provided by textile design firm Wallace Sewell, these are must-have editions of European masterpieces, celebrating the warp and weft of a shared literary treasury.


TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY AWARD-WINNING NOVELIST AND POET ADAM THORPE

Madame Bovary begins where many other novels end: with marriage. But Emma Bovary is ill-prepared for the prosaic reality of life as a country doctor?s wife, and so plunges into a doomed search for passion and delight, flitting from fantasy to religion, from hedonism to devoted motherhood, from shopping to extra-marital sex. Flaubert?s brutally beautiful tale is subversive in its sexual frankness, revolutionary in its influence and an inexhaustible pleasure to read.

?One of the finest novels in any language? Independent