A madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea, and suddenly an entire vanished world rises from the cup. Proust spent his final years in a cork-lined room, asthmatic, dying, racing to complete what might be the most ambitious novel ever written. Seven volumes, three thousand pages, sentences that unspool across entire paragraphs like silk being drawn from a cocoon. It is a book about time, about love, about jealousy, about art, about how we become who we are and forget who we were. No one has ever captured the texture of consciousness with such patience. Reading it changes the way you experience your own memory.