"Continuing the story begun in Swann's Way and continued in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes Way follows Proust's young protagonist as he advances through aristocratic French society in late-nineteenth-century Paris. A departure from the intimacy of the sprawling novel's previous two installments, part three unfolds against a colorful backdrop of Parisian life, moving from literary salon to opulent social gathering to provide...

'The transmutation of sensation into sentiment, the ebb tide of memory, waves of emotion such as desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria—this is the material of this enormous and yet singularly light and translucid work.
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV
In the overture to Swann's Way, the themes of the whole of In Search of Lost Time are introduced, and the narrator's childhood in Paris and Combray is recalled, most memorably in...

"The Guermantes way" is the path that runs past the chateau belonging to the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes. It also represents the path into "the social kaleidoscope" traveled by Proust's narrator, which culminates in his introduction to the Paris salon of the Guermantes. The rich cast of characters in this third volume of In Search of Lost Time includes Robert de Saint-Loup, who is obsessed with the prostitute Rachel, and Baron...

'Proust is perhaps the last great historian of the loves, the society, the intelligence, the diplomacy, the literature and the art of the Heartbreak House of capitalist culture.' ——————EDMUND WILSON
The final volume of In Search of Lost Time chronicles the years of World War I, when, as M. de Charlus reflects on a moonlit walk, Paris threatens to become another Pompeii. Years later, after the war's end, Proust's narrator returns...

Lost in the blacked-out streets of Paris during the First World War, Marcel stumbles into a brothel and accidentally witnesses a shocking crime involving Baron de Charlus. Later, at a reception given by the Prince de Guermates, his meditations on the passage of time lead to his determination to embark on his life's work at last.

The Modern Library’s fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time contains both The Captive (1923) and The Fugitive (1925). In The Captive, Proust’s narrator describes living in his mother’s Paris apartment with his lover, Albertine, and subsequently falling out of love with her. In The Fugitive, the narrator loses Albertine forever. Rich with irony, The Captive and The Fugitive inspire meditations on...