Proust, A Family Affair cover art

Proust, A Family Affair

Pre-order: Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Proust, A Family Affair

By: Laure Murat, Charlotte Mandell - translator
Pre-order: Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Pre-order Now for £27.99

Pre-order Now for £27.99

Summary

Proust's In Search of Lost Time is many things. It is a staggering achievement, an evocation of an elite milieu, a literary reckoning with memory; it is also a massive reading challenge, a book more abandoned than read. For Laure Murat - who first read In Search... when she was twenty years old - it was a map to the world of the French aristocracy, the very world into which she had been born. The chateaux and balls of In Search... were, for her, the backdrop of her family story, understood anew through Proust's eyes.

In this beautiful book, Murat explores the fixity of the aristocratic life, which codifies everything from speech to dress to movement; and Proust's astonishing seven-volume novel, which, with fluidity and linguistic virtuosity, shifts focus from the codes for behaving to the experience of living. In Proust, A Family Affair, Murat celebrates the emancipating power of literature, and the honour of paying close attention to a text that may, in turn, provoke a close and loving attendance to the self.

© Laure Murat 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

LGBTQ+ Studies Social Classes & Economic Disparity Sociology
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_c
No reviews yet