In the Library
The Lost Estate
Henri Alain-Fournier, 1913
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Françoise Delisle (1928)
- Chapters
- Chapters 46
- Length
- Length 67k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
the house from which we launched our adventures and to which they returned to break themselves like waves on a bare rock.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
About the book
In the flat, foggy fields of the Sologne stands a house that should not exist, candlelit and crowded with children in fancy dress, celebrating a wedding whose bride never arrives. Augustin Meaulnes, a schoolboy sent to meet a train, loses his way, abandons the cart, and wanders into the party by accident, dances all night with a girl named Yvonne de Galais, and is driven home before dawn without ever learning the road. He spends the rest of Henri Alain-Fournier's only novel trying to retrace a road he can no longer remember, and for most of the book, he can't. Alain-Fournier died within a year of publication, killed in the opening weeks of the First World War, so this stayed his only novel, one long act of mourning for a place that may never have been real. What it knows, better than almost any book, is that the happiest hour of a life is the one whose road back you can never find again.