Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary begins where many other novels end: with marriage. But Emma Bovary is ill-prepared for the prosaic reality of life as a country doctor's wife, and so plunges into a doomed search for passion and delight, flitting from fantasy to religion, from hedonism to devoted motherhood, from shopping to extra-marital sex.

Flaubert's brutally beautiful tale is subversive in its sexual frankness, revolutionary in its influence and an inexhaustible pleasure to read.