The Lover

A modern classic and international best-seller with more than one million copies in print, The Lover has been celebrated by critics and readers throughout the world since its initial publication in 1984. Set in the prewar Indochina of Marguerite Duras’s childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover. In spare yet luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins of Saigon in the waning days of France’s colonial empire, and its representation in the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts. This edition of The Lover includes a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen that looks back at Duras’s iconic work—a winner of France’s Prix Goncourt—as it approaches the fortieth anniversary of its publication. (With an introduction by Viet Thanh Nguyen; translated from the French by Barbara Bray.)