The tragic and complicated French romance about a teenage boy who seduces the wife of a soldier
during World War I and one of the most startling literary debuts of all timeA Penguin ClassicAs
the First World War reaches its final year an illicit love affair is beginning between a
sixteen-year-old boy and a young woman who is married to a soldier at the front. They meet
secretly in her flat on the outskirts of Paris in cornfields and on river banks. When she
receives letters from her husband they burn them together. Intoxicated by passion they cannot
bear to end their affair even when it causes a scandal among their friends and neighbours.
Instead they can only hurtle towards tragedy.Written in spare haunting prose when Raymond
Radiguet was still a teenager and loosely based on his life The Devil in the Flesh became an
instant bestseller and its author was hailed as a genius before dying tragically at the age of
twenty. It is a work of startling imagery and subtle beauty about power betrayal and passion
that expresses all the anguish and joy of adolescence.
