Le Grand Meaulnes is a modern French classic. François Seurel, the narrator, is the son a village schoolmaster in the Sologne, a region of lakes and sandy forests in North Central France. A new boy Augustin Meaulnes, who comes from a poor background, arrives in class but soon disappears. Later he returns from an escapade in which he had stumbled into an incredible and magical fancy dress wedding party. It is there he had met the mysterious and enchanting Yvonne de Galais. This is a nostalgic tale of adolescent romance set in La France profonde. The poetry of the language is one of the great appeals of this slim volume (only 256 pages). Others are the interlocking elements in its plotline. Above all there is an elegiac sadness which hangs like a damp mist over a tale of lost innocence. Alain-Fournier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Fournier) may have sensed his time was very short and indeed he was killed in action on 22 September 1914, the year after the publication of the novel.
This is one to savour, if you like that kind of thing!
Alain-Fournier
256 pages in Penguin Classics paperback edition.
ISBN: 978-0141441894