D. J.1920 Enright

In the second volume of the acclaimed novel, the narrator recalls his adolescent discoveries of art and women in Belle Époque France.

Following the events of Swann’s Way, the nameless narrator shifts his attention to memories of his teenage years. His relationship with the Swann family is altered as his love for Gilberte fizzles out. Two years later, he accompanies his grandmother to the resort town of Balbec on

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In the third volume of the celebrated novel, a writer comes into his own and learns the way of the world in Paris.
 
Continuing the nameless narrator’s voyage through his memories after Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way finds him and his family entering Parisian high society. They have moved into a stately old town house owned by the Duke and Duchess de Guermantes in the Fauborg Saint-Germain district...

Sodom and Gomorrah (1921/22) is the fourth volume of Marcel Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time. Being the last volume that had Proust's direct involvement, Sodom and Gomorrah is a story of love, jealousy and family from a master of Modernist literature. Praised by Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Chabon, and Graham Greene, In Search of Lost Time explores the nature of memory and time while illuminating the history of homosexuality...

On the surface a traditional Bildungsroman describing the narrator's journey of self-discovery, this huge and complex book is also a panoramic and richly comic portrait of France in the author's lifetime, and a profound meditation on the nature of art, love, time, memory and death. But for most readers it is the characters of the novel who loom the largest: Swann and Odette, Monsieur de Charlus, Morel, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Françoise, Saint-Loup...