"Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert

This famous story has been televised, criticised, analysed, and even banned until it is one of those stories that you've all heard about, but never read.

Let me then introduce you to it for the first time. Meet Emma Rouault, poor daughter of a farmer, desperate for love and something better in her life than raising cattle. She marries a comfortable and dependable doctor, to whom she means eveything. Two tempestuous affairs later, and with one daughter, she finally commits suicide by eating arsenic.

What went wrong? you may ask....well that is for you to read and find out! Flaubert writes poetically, sprinkling his words with touches of french in names and places (which can get a bit annoying), the story line is tragic but still realistic, and despite everything, I finished the book feeling desperately sorry for Emma and her lot:

"Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again....."