The Wanderer - Le Grand Meaulnes Author:Henri Alain-Fournier THE WANDERER is one of the most striking and beautiful evocations of adolescence ever written. Its poignant description of a young French schoolboy's first love and his subsequent search for the young girl who inspired it realizes Alain-Fournier's ambition "to insert the marvellous into reality." Yet reality is never sacrificed for the luminou... more »s quality that infuses it: the characters are intensely alive; the setting, the winding country rods, peasant life, the cold bleak schoolhouse, the landscape, are brilliantly recaptured. But the novel's greatest strength lies in its profound psychological penetration, a breadth of insight which makes calling this simply "a brilliant novel about adolescence" an understatement. The Wanderer is deservedly a classic of modern French literature.« less