Belle du Seigneur

Geneva, the 1930s. Solal, the brilliant and disillusioned Under-Secretary-General of the League of Nations, sets out to seduce Ariane, the beautiful, aristocratic wife of one of his own foppish underlings — and succeeds so completely that the affair swallows them both. Across a sweeping, savagely ironic epic, Albert Cohen dissects romantic passion down to its vanities and self-deceptions, following the lovers from ecstasy to claustrophobia to a shared and bitter end. Winner of the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française.