Raymond Radiguet

'A triumph of the poetic intelligence: a masterpiece' New Statesman'So shrewd, so ruthless, glittering and clever... every page he wrote was a delight' Fay WeldonIn this novel of desire and perdition, a bored and precocious adolescent pursues the wife of a soldier fighting in the First World War. At first attracted to Marthe out of sheer aimlessness, he finds himself falling in love. Consumed by sensual pleasure and power games, the pair do nothing to disguise their affair - until the consequences of their heedlessness begin to unfold.This shockingly sexy novel rocketed its teenage author into overnight fame in the 1920s - and was all the more scandalous for being based on his life.Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.Translated by Christopher Moncrieff.Raymond Radiguet (1903-1923) entered Parisian literary society with a bang when The Devil in the Flesh was published. Only eighteen at the time, he became the star of an unprecedented publicity campaign and earned copious praise and censure for his precocious talent and scandalous behaviour - the more so as the novel was based on his own wartime affair with a soldier's wife. A protégé and perhaps lover of Jean Cocteau, he fraternized with artists, dancers and aristocrats, drank heavily, and generally ran riot, before settling down for a brief period, during which he wrote one more novel, Count d'Orgel, also published by Pushkin Press. Shortly after the manuscript was completed, he contracted typhoid fever and died within a few weeks, aged only twenty. He is buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.Christopher Moncrieff is a poet, linguist and literary translator from French, German and Romanian. As well as a writing career he has served in the military and produced son et lumiere spectacles. He is descended from the poet Robert Burns.

As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair is beginning between a sixteen-year-old boy and a young woman married to a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on the outskirts of Paris, in cornfields and on river banks. When she receives letters from her husband, they burn them together. Intoxicated by passion, they cannot bear to end their affair, even when it causes a scandal among their friends and neighbours. Instead, they hurtle towards tragedy. Written in spare, haunting prose when Raymond Radiguet was still a teenager, this semi-autobiographical novel became an instant bestseller and its author was hailed as a genius before his tragic death at the age of twenty. Expressing all the anguish and joy of adolescence, it is a work of startling imagery and subtle beauty. Translated by Robert Baldick with an introduction by Fay Weldon