The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities

A hardcover omnibus edition of the French writer’s most famous novel alongside her fascinating wartime writings and a collection of searingly honest and intimate autobiographical essays. Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics.

Marguerite Duras was one of the leading intellectuals and novelists of postwar France, but her wartime writings were not published in full until after her death. The Wartime Notebooks trace Duras’s formative experiences—including her difficult childhood in Indochina and her harrowing wait for her husband’s return from Nazi internment—revealing the personal history behind her bestselling novels. The Lover is the best known of these; set in prewar Indochina, its haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her wealthy Chinese lover is based on her own life. In spare and luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins in the waning days of France’s colonial empire, and the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts. Practicalities is a collection of small and intensely personal pieces Duras dictated near the end of her life. These deceptively simple meditations on motherhood, domesticity, sex, love, alcohol, writing, and more are witty, earthy, outspoken, and surprisingly fresh and relevant today.

About the author

Marguerite Duras is the author of many acclaimed novels and screenplays, including The Lover, The Ravishing of Lol Stein, and the film script for Hiroshima, Mon Amour. One of France’s most important literary figures, Duras died in Paris in 1996.