Nadja

Nadja follows a narrator in Paris who meets a girl and becomes caught up in her company. The book is his first-person account of that relationship, and of a presence that keeps returning to trouble his everyday life.

The account is accompanied by forty-four photographs, which are part of the work itself. They show people, places and objects that the narrator visits, or that haunt him while Nadja is near. Each one prompts him to consider how real the thing is, or whether it is real at all.

Nadja is a Surrealist romance, first published in France in 1928. It is an early and influential example of the movement, and it sets out Surrealism's attitude toward ordinary life.

The girl herself is hard to pin down. She is less a settled character than a state of mind, a way of seeing, or a force that changes how the people around her act. The reader may wonder whether she exists.

Reading it means following a mind that drifts between the city, the images and its own doubts. It is a short, strange and reflective book rather than a plot-driven one, and Nadja is what holds it together.