The Magnificent Meaulnes (Le Grand Meaulnes)

It has captured the hearts, and fantasies, of generations of adolescents and lingered on their bookshelves, and in their souls, well into middle age...a tale of enchantment. It is, above all, a fairy tale, one imbued with the beauties of the French countryside, an eerie, charged nostalgia and all the yearnings of the budding Bohemian soul * Independent *
A bewitching tale of adolescence, love, adventure and the mysterious spaces in between * Sunday Times *
One of the most romantic, elegiac novels of adolescence ever written...resounds with not only the unfulfilled promise of the writer and his fictional alter ego but also that of a generation * Sunday Telegraph *
It is an extraordinary book, part fairytale or romance, part realistic study of French provincial life, sometimes grim, in the last years of the 19th century; and some of its fascination comes from this curiously hybrid quality. It is both naive and knowing. It has the dewy freshness of a first novel, but it is also admirably constructed * Spectator *
Intense, perfectly capturing that interval between childhood and the adult world -- Rosie Thomas