Les Liaisons dangereuses

Set in the idle, glittering aristocracy of France in the years before the Revolution, Les Liaisons dangereuses unfolds entirely through the letters of its characters. At its centre are two former lovers and current confidants, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, who treat seduction as a competitive sport and use the people around them as pieces in an elaborate game of manipulation, revenge, and wounded vanity.

Merteuil enlists Valmont in a scheme to corrupt the young, convent-educated Cécile de Volanges; Valmont, meanwhile, sets his sights on the pious and married Madame de Tourvel, wagering that he can make even a virtuous woman fall. As their intrigues intertwine, their letters reveal a world of exquisite cruelty in which sincerity is the only real taboo, and in which the games they play begin, at last, to escape their control.

Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 novel is a masterpiece of the epistolary form and one of the great studies of seduction, power, and hypocrisy in European literature. Coolly ironic and psychologically acute, it remains startlingly modern in its dissection of the ways people use desire as a weapon.