In Search of Lost Time

The opening volume of Marcel Proust’s vast novel introduces a narrator who, tasting a madeleine dipped in tea, feels a whole vanished childhood surge back to him. From that famous moment the book moves outward into the drowsy summers of Combray, the social world of turn-of-the-century France, and the long inset story ‘Swann in Love,’ where Charles Swann is consumed by jealous passion for the elusive Odette. Proust turns memory itself into his real subject, showing how the past survives in sensation rather than in fact. First published in 1913, it began one of the most searching works of modern literature. This free PDF and EPUB uses the classic Scott Moncrieff translation.