The Chateau - Softcover

"Not just a book of the year but now one of my desert island books." (Adrian Turpin Herald Scotland)

"Delicious and dead-on... All the embarrassments and gratifications of European travel are preserved in the amber of Maxwell's much pondered, seemingly casual prose." (New Yorker)

"As the voices of Austen, Turgenev and Tolstoy have survived, so will Maxwell's. There aren't many truly great writers among us. William Maxwell is one of them" (The Times)

"It's hard not to see it as a work of genius" (Times Literary Supplement)

"His gentle urbanity is a joy" (Sunday Telegraph)

It is 1948 and a young American couple arrive in France for a holiday, full of anticipation and enthusiasm. But the countryside and people are war-battered, and their reception at the Chateau Beaumesnil is not all the open-hearted Americans could wish for.