ABOUT
THE BOOK

Madame is a novel, which sparkles with light and warmth, about Poland during the grim years of Soviet-controlled mediocrity.
The young narrator-hero is suffering through the regulated boredom of high school when his is transfixed by a new teacher, an elegant ‘older woman’ (she is thirty-two) who bewitches him with her glacial beauty and her strict intelligence. He resolves to learn everything he can about her and to win her heart.
He finds out much more than he expected, about politics, Poland, the Spanish Civil War and his own passion for theatre and art, all while his loved one continues to elude him. Yet without his realising it, his efforts, largely bookish and literary, to close in on Madame are his first steps to liberation as an artist. Later, during a stint as a teacher-in-training in his old school, he discovers that he himself has become a legendary figure to a new generation of students, and he begins to understand the deceits and blessings of myth, and its redemptive power.
A portrait of an artist as a young man, Madame is also a moving, engaging novel about strength and weakness, first love, and the efforts we make to reconcile, in art, the opposing forces of reason and