The North China Lover

A Novel

Marguerite Duras

Translated by Leigh Hafrey

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Far more daring and truthful than any of her other novels, The North China Lover is a fascinating retelling of the dramatic experiences of Duras’s adolescence that shaped her most famous work. Initially conceived as notes toward a screenplay for The Lover, this later novel, written toward the end of her life, emphasizes the tougher aspects of her youth in Indochina and possesses the intimate feel of a documentary.

Both shocking and enthralling, the story Duras tells is “so powerfully imagined (or remembered) that it . . . lingers like a strong perfume” (Publishers Weekly). Hailed by the French critics as a return to “the Duras of the great books and the great days,” it is a mature and complex rendering of a formative period in the author’s life.

Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) was one of France’s most important literary figures. She is the author of such acclaimed novels as The Lover, The Ravishing of Lol Stein, and The Sailor from Gibraltar, as well as the screenplay for Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Leigh Hafrey is Senior Lecturer in Behavioral and Policy Sciences at the MIT Sloan School of Management.  He has translated fiction and non-fiction from French and German.