The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) (Penguin Classics)

When Meaulnes first arrives in Sologne, everyone is captivated by his good looks, daring, and charisma. But when he attends a strange party at a mysterious house with a beautiful girl hidden inside, he is changed forever.

Published here in the first new English translation since 1959, this evocative novel has at its center both a Peter Pan in provincial France - a kid who refuses to grow up - and a Parsifal, pursuing his love to the ends of the earth. Poised between youthful admiration and adult resignation, Alain- Fournier's narrator compellingly carries the reader through this indelible portrait of desperate friendship and vanished adolescence.