Clara Reads Proust
By (Author) Stphane Carlier
Translated by Polly Mackintosh
Pushkin Press
Pushkin Press
2nd December 2025
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Narrative theme: coming of age
Humorous fiction
Paperback
176
Width 129mm, Height 198mm
'An elegant and quietly lyrical charting of a life changed by books' Irish Times
'Full of charm, sensitivity and intelligence. Brilliant.' Antoine Laurain, author of The Red Noteboook
______Clara is a hairdresser at Cindy Coiffure, a sleepy French salon with an identity crisis. Her relationship is fizzling out. Her tanoholic boss Madame Habib worships Jacques Chirac and talks longingly of her days in Paris. And now Madame Lvy-Leroyer wants to go blonde. Clara can't help but wonder if there's more to life than this . . .
Everything changes when a customer leaves behind the first volume of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. As Clara reads, she discovers a new world. And slowly but surely, she will work out who she wants to be.
'An elegant and quietly lyrical charting of a life changed by books' - Irish Times
'Full of charm, sensitivity and intelligence. Brilliant' - Antoine Laurain, author of The Red Notebook
Stphane Carlier was born in 1971 in Argenteuil, France. Clara Reads Proust is his eighth novel and the first to be translated into English.