Madame

Translated by Agnieska Kolakowska

Madame tells the story of a Polish teenager pursuing intellectual maturity—and the older woman of his dreams, his French teacher—in the communist-dominated Warsaw of the late sixties. As the erotic tension builds, Antoni Libera paints an unforgettable portrait of a free mind in a repressive culture. This is a great novel: funny, moving and wonderfully exuberant.

Praise for Madame:

‘A wonderfully rare achievement…the best works of literature usually have a simple story…here we find a clever high-school student infatuated with the new French teacher. Of course, it is in the telling that such stories are nudged into the pantheon of great literature.’

Los Angeles Times

‘Imagine Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with a far more likeable protagonist and a dazzlingly sexy and elusive heroine…an exceptionally entertaining book.’

Washington Post

‘Libera's portrayal of a gifted mind learning courage and honor in the most deprived of circumstances is inherently powerful and dramatic.’

New York Times Book Review

‘Madame has everything: poetry, politics and love. The more repressive a regime is, the more creative will be the efforts to undermine it. Madame is a metaphor for that struggle, and, in creating it, Libera has scored a beautiful victory for the better half of human nature.’

San Francisco Chronicle

‘I picked up Madame at 4p.m. and finished it at dawn. It’s a book you can’t put down...well constructed and elegantly written…I loved it. The portrayal of recent realities in the Polish People’s Republic—skeptical, realistic and grotesque, at times irresistibly funny, at others irresistibly sad—makes an excellent contrasting backdrop for Madame’s subtle and intricate love story.’

Tygodnik Powszechny