Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was arguably France's best-known literary writer. He wrote stories, essays, translations, and a 3, 000-page novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27).

This book is a brief guide to Proust's magnum opus in which Joshua Landy invites the reader to view the novel as a single quest-a quest for purpose, enchantment, identity, connection, and belonging- through the novel's fascinating treatments of memory, society, art, same-sex desire, knowledge, self-understanding, self-fashioning, and the unconscious mind.