Madame

In a novel set in Soviet-era Poland, a boy is bewitched by his teacher and vows to win her heart, but later, when he becomes a teacher himself, he sees the story from the opposite side of the instructor's desk. Reprint.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.