Madame Bovary (Vintage Classic Europeans Series)

The Vintage Classics Europeans series - with covers provided by textile design firm Wallace Sewell, these are must-have editions of European masterpieces, celebrating the warp and weft of a shared literary treasury. Madame Bovary begins where many other novels end: with marriage. But Emma Bovary is ill-prepared for the prosaic reality of life as a country doctor's wife, and so plunges into a doomed search for passion and delight, flitting from fantasy to religion, from hedonism to devoted motherhood, from shopping to extra-marital sex.

Flaubert's brutally beautiful tale is subversive in its sexual frankness, revolutionary in its influence and an inexhaustible pleasure to read.