"Magnificent. I insist everyone reads Adam Thorpe's new translation" (Vogue)"The most scandalous novel of all time" (Playboy)"Flaubert's 1856 novel begins with marriage and what follows is the archetypal tale of a desperate housewife" (Daily Telegraph)"?Thorpe's new translation of Madame Bovary is to die for?" (Independent)"[Thorpe?s] hard work has yielded beauty. The rhythms are perfectly judged, unexpected enough to make the reader attend to every word" (Robert Chandler, TLS)

The Vintage Classics Europeans series - with covers provided by textile design firm Wallace Sewell, these are must-have editions of European masterpieces, celebrating the warp and weft of a shared literary treasury.TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY AWARD-WINNING NOVELIST AND POET ADAM THORPEMadame Bovary begins where many other novels end: with marriage. But Emma Bovary is ill-prepared for the prosaic reality of life as a country doctor?s wife, and so plunges into a doomed search for passion and delight, flitting from fantasy to religion, from hedonism to devoted motherhood, from shopping to extra-marital sex. Flaubert?s brutally beautiful tale is subversive in its sexual frankness, revolutionary in its influence and an inexhaustible pleasure to read.?One of the finest novels in any language? Independent