The Impudent Ones

Published for the first time in English, the debut novel by the award-winning author of The Lover tells of a family crisis and a daughter's fall from grace.

Marguerite Duras rose to global stardom with her erotic masterpiece The Lover(L'Amant), which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt, has over a million copies in print in English, has been translated into forty-three languages, and was adapted into a canonical film in 1992. While almost all of Duras's novels have been translated into English, her debut The Impudent Ones (Les Impudents) has been a glaring exception—until now. Fans of Duras will be thrilled to discover her signature blend of memoir and fiction in the intense story of the Taneran family and the scalding effects of seduction and disrepute on the soul of a young French girl.

Including an essay on the story behind The Impudent Ones by Jean Vallier—biographer of the late Duras—this one-of-a-kind publishing endeavor is a must-read for Duras fans and a new readers alike.

"Rendered with touches of Flaubert, the Brontës, and Woolf . . . this . . . intriguing novel is revealed to be the proving ground on which Duras taught herself how to cast her provocative spell." —Booklist

"The book offers a roadmap for what was to come." —Martha Anne Toll, NPR Books

"The brutal honesty with which [Duras] approaches feminine subjectivity and interrogates social class are already fully realized in ways that anticipate the work of Elena Ferrante." —Kathryn Lachman, associate professor of Comparative Literature at UMass Amherst and author of Borrowed Forms

"Absolutely spellbinding." —Alice Jardine, professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University and author of At the Risk of Thinking