# Madame Bovary

- Author: Gustave Flaubert
- Translator: Lydia Davis
- Original title (French): Madame Bovary
- First published: 1857
- Publisher: Penguin Classics
- This edition: 2011
- ISBN: 9780143106494
- Shelf: Tonight's Classic (one a night, from this pool); World Classics

## Card

A doctor's wife in a Normandy town, bored by provincial life, chases the romance she has read about in novels.  
Each scene is built from exact, ordinary detail, and the irony is so quiet it can be easy to miss.  
For a night when the town feels too small.  

## About this book

Emma grows up on a farm reading romantic novels and marries Charles Bovary, a decent but dull country doctor. Life in their small town resembles nothing in her books, and she looks for it elsewhere: in finery, in a young clerk's admiration, in an affair with a landowner. Debts gather quietly in the background. Lydia Davis's translation keeps close to the precision and rhythm of the French.

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