First published in 1919, Within a Budding Grove was awarded the Prix Goncourt, bringing the author immediate fame. In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swann's Way to memories of his adolescence. Having gradually become indifferent to Swann's daughter Gilberte, the narrator visits the seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother and meets a new object of attention--Albertine, "a girl...

Published in 1913, Swann's Way is the first of the seven parts of Marcel Proust's masterpiece, "Remembrance of things past," one of the major achievements of 20th-century literature. The narrator discovers that an involuntary memory triggered by some casual action, say, eating a madeleine cake or stooping to remove one's shoe, has the power to recover large areas of the past, and he sets out to resurrect his past life and the people and places that...