The Lost Domain

'I am looking for something still more mysterious: for the path you read about in books, the old lane choked with undergrowth whose entrance the weary prince could not discover.'

The Lost Domain (1913) is an adventure story as well as a lyrical homage to life in pre-war rural France. One of France's best-loved and most read novels of all time, it is a tale of growing up, friendship, love, and loss, threaded through with traits of romance, fantasy, and make-believe. François Seurel, the son of a schoolteacher, recounts events of his adolescence that revolve around his friend Augustin Meaulnes, a bold dreamer who stumbles into an elaborate fête at a mysterious 'lost domain', falls in love, yet seems destined never again to find the bewitching location nor his beloved. Much of the narrative circles round the question of whether the past can ever be revived. The simple pleasures and sensory delights of rural childhood, the exhilarations and disappointments of youthful discoveries, and the poignant confrontation of dream and reality are combined in prose that modulates between face-paced and poetic. At just twenty-seven years old, Alain-Fournier died in action in 1914, the year after the publication of The Lost Domain, which remains a nostalgic portrait of the France that was shattered by the First World War.

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