Colette's irresistible depiction of a childhood in rural France, in a lush new translation

‘I will never be able to help anyone imagine the splendour, bound up in my memories’

Claudine lives in a large house with a rose-filled garden and a vegetable patch smelling of tomato leaves and apricots. Beyond it is the village, where travelling performers stop for the night and wedding feasts take place under a bright summer moon. Inside her house are Mama, who loves animals, Papa, who lost his leg in the war, and a library full of irresistible books. Based on Colette’s own early life, Claudine’s House is a vivid, enchanting depiction of childhood, memory and the passing of time in late-nineteenth-century France.

‘Her sensual prose style made her one of the great writers of twentieth-century France’ New York Times Book Review

Translated with an Introduction by Belinda Jack

"Her sensual prose style made her one of the great writers of twentieth-century France" - New York Times Book Review

"Her prose is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious and utterly beautiful" - Vogue

"Brilliant, a novelist who prized the body over the mind… [her novels offer a] devastating portrait of beauty, seduction and the ravages of time" - The New Yorker

"France’s foremost woman of letters …[although] she did not invent the Modern French Woman in fiction, [she supplied] the organs, the accuracies, the mind and the heart" - TIME