Read The Count of Monte Cristo

D Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis against the Cardinal; all for one.

A doctor's wife in provincial Normandy bored into adultery and debt; the perfect novel, said Nabokov.

A miners' strike in northern France; Zola went down the pits to write it.

Julien Sorel climbs through Restoration France by seduction; Stendhal's ambition novel.

The madeleine and the first volume of In Search of Lost Time; start here.

Expatriates drink through Paris and Pamplona; Hemingway's lost generation.

A psychiatrist and his patient-wife on the Riviera; Fitzgerald's other novel.

Bardamu through the war, colonial Africa, Detroit and the Paris suburbs; Celine's furious slang.