Raymond Radiguet – författare

Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Oliver Chris, known for his roles in King Charles III, Bluestone 42, Motherland and Green Wing. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by Robert Mighall.As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair is beginning between a sixteen-year-old boy and a young woman 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, this semi-autobiographical novel became an instant bestseller and its author was hailed as a genius, before dying tragically at the age of twenty. Expressing all the anguish and joy of adolescence, it is a work of startling imagery and subtle beauty.

The Devil in the Flesh, one of the finest, most delicate love stories ever written, is set in Paris during the last year of the First World War. The narrator, a boy of 16, tells of his love affair with Martha Lacombe, a young woman whose soldier husband is away at the front. With an accuracy of insight that is almost ruthless, he describes his conflicting emotions—the pride of an adolescent on the verge of manhood and the pain of a child thrust too fast into maturity.

The liaison soon becomes a scandal, and their friends, horrified and incredulous, refuse to accept what is happening—even when the affair reaches its tragic climax.

'A triumph of the poetic intelligence: a masterpiece' New Statesman

'So shrewd, so ruthless, glittering and clever... every page he wrote was a delight' Fay Weldon

In this novel of desire and perdition, a bored and precocious adolescent pursues the wife of a soldier fighting in the First World War. At first attracted to Marthe out of sheer aimlessness, he finds himself falling in love. Consumed by sensual pleasure and power games, the pair do nothing to disguise their affair - until the consequences of their heedlessness begin to unfold.

This shockingly sexy novel rocketed its teenage author into overnight fame in the 1920s - and was all the more scandalous for being based on his life.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Christopher Moncrieff.

Raymond Radiguet (1903-1923) entered Parisian literary society with a bang when The Devil in the Flesh was published. Only eighteen at the time, he became the star of an unprecedented publicity campaign and earned copious praise and censure for his precocious talent and scandalous behaviour - the more so as the novel was based on his own wartime affair with a soldier's wife. A protégé and perhaps lover of Jean Cocteau, he fraternized with artists, dancers and aristocrats, drank heavily, and generally ran riot, before settling down for a brief period, during which he wrote one more novel, Count d'Orgel, also published by Pushkin Press. Shortly after the manuscript was completed, he contracted typhoid fever and died within a few weeks, aged only twenty. He is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Christopher Moncrieff is a poet, linguist and literary translator from French, German and Romanian. As well as a writing career he has served in the military and produced son et lumière spectacles. He is descended from the poet Robert Burns.