Julian Barnes and Hermione Lee travel to France in search of the places and people which inspired his novel of adolescent love Le Grand Meaulnes. Part 1: A Childhood in Sologne. The village school where Fournier's father taught, the holidays he spent at his grandparents' cottage and the tumbledown house in the woods nearby fed the imagination of Henri Alban-Fournier. He drew on these locations when creating his only finished novel Le Grand Meaulnes, a simply written story of love and longing as an adventuring schoolboy discovers an almost mythical lost estate lived in by a young women, which the writer published under his pen name 'Alain-Fournier'. Auguste Meaulnes' fictional quest to retrace his steps and find the woman he dreams about echoes Fournier's own romantic obsession with a young woman he encountered briefly in Paris - whom he later traced using private detectives.
- ISBN10 1471387119
- ISBN13 9781471387111
- Publish Date 1 October 2012
- Publish Status Withdrawn
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher BBC Audio, A Division Of Random House
- Imprint BBC Digital Audio
- Edition Unabridged edition
- Format Audiobook (WAV)
- Language English