The Lover Audiobook By Marguerite Duras cover art

The Lover

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 Months Free

$8.99/mo. after 3 months. Cancel anytime.
Get this deal
Offer ends on July 15, 2026 at 11:59 PT.
More purchase options

The Lover

By: Marguerite Duras
Narrated by: Kathleen Gati
Get this deal

$8.99/mo. after 3 months. Cancel anytime. Offer ends July 15, 2026 at 11:59pm PT.

Buy for $13.50

Buy for $13.50

An international best-seller with more than one million copies in print and a winner of France's Prix Goncourt, The Lover has been acclaimed by critics all over the world since its first publication in 1984.

Set in the prewar Indochina of Marguerite Duras's childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover. In spare yet luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins of Saigon in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and its representation in the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts.

This edition of The Lover includes a new introduction by Maxine Hong Kingston that looks back at Duras's world from an intriguing new perspective--that of a visitor to Vietnam today. Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Romance
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1

Critic reviews

"Powerful, authentic, completely successful . . . perfect."
—The New York Times Book Review

“An exquisite jewel of a novel, as multifaceted as a diamond, as seamless and polished as a pearl.”
—Boston Herald

“A vivid, lingering novel . . . a brilliant work of art.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
All stars
Most relevant
Haunting flickers of memory that linger in the air like the strains of a guitar string or a piano note or a heady perfume. I’m left quite breathless.

Bold, harsh, haunting

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A very personal and eloquent telling of pain from young love. An imperfect family impels a very young lady to seek an outside relationship that severely complicates her life until elderly.

Poignant memories

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Duras' classic, semi-autobiographical novel is so beautiful and tragically sad. One longing might only be that like life, you only wish it were a little longer.

Beautiful, Sparse, Classic

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A heart wrenching love story of something that cannot be. It had me on the edge of my seat hoping for these two to end up together and at the same time knowing it’s wrong for them.
It had become one of my favorite Books

Amazing love story

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Found it a bit creepy. Visited the house in Vietnam and so I wanted to read the book.

Not a favorite

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.