The tragic and complicated French romance about a teenage boy who
seduces the wife of a soldier during World War I--and one of the most
startling literary debuts of all time
A Penguin Classic
As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair is
beginning between a sixteen-year-old boy and a young woman who is
married to a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on the
outskirts of Paris, in cornfields and on river banks. When she receives
letters from her husband, they burn them together. Intoxicated by
passion, they cannot bear to end their affair, even when it causes a
scandal among their friends and neighbours. Instead, they can only
hurtle towards tragedy.
Written in spare, haunting prose when Raymond Radiguet was still a
teenager, and loosely based on his life, The Devil in the Flesh became
an instant bestseller and its author was hailed as a genius, before
dying tragically at the age of twenty. It is a work of startling imagery
and subtle beauty about power, betrayal, and passion that expresses all
the anguish and joy of adolescence.