Madame Bovary (Vintage Classic Europeans Series)

Book excerpt: 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 (AUTHOR OF ULVERTON) 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