Madame
Antoni Libera
Available as Paperback
A winning portrait of an artist as a young man, Madame is a moving novel about strength and weakness, first love, and the efforts we make to reconcile, in art, the opposing forces of reason and passion
Madame tells the story of a self-absorbed Polish teenager as he pursues intellectual maturity, and the woman of his dreams, his French teacher ‘Madame’, in the communist-dominated Warsaw of the early 1970s.
Libera paces his exuberant young hero’s fulminations, fantasies and discoveries beautifully, building a remarkably subtle characterisation of a free mind in a repressive culture. This is one of those rare novels which reminds us why we love books. A consummate literary entertainment.
“Essentially a vision of a life-changing teenage crush, Libera’s debut novel … captures the frustrations of grasping for anything of the world from behind the Iron Curtain and of battling or passion of any kind.”
the Scotsman
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“Madame is skilfully written and the subtle backdrop of communism is interesting and convincing.”
the List
“This is an old story made fresh with an excellent evocation of a spirit-crushing school system - a microcosm of communist rule under which the layers of life are corrupted by concessions, compromises and deceptions.”
the Times
Antoni Libera
Antoni Libera is a literary critic, translator and theatre director, noted especially for his collaborative work with Samuel Beckett. Madame is his first novel. He lives in Warsaw, Poland.
Agnieszka Kolakowska born in Poland in 1960, brought up in England and educated at Yale and Cambridge. She has translated works from Polish and French into English, as well as working as a freelance editor and journalist. Books translated include:Them: Stalin’s Polish Puppets by Teresa Toranska and Freedom, Fame, Lying and Betrayal by Leszek Kolakowski