*The Lover* by Marguerite Duras, translated by Wang Daoqian/Nanshan, Shanghai Translation Publishing House

A female writer who, alongside Kundera, Murakami, and Eileen Chang, appeals to a bourgeois readership and is a fashion icon; an artist with a legendary life story, shockingly rebellious personality, and vibrant love life; a writer who can be called the pride of contemporary French culture, and a writer who guides the fashion of world literature...
The Lover is one of Duras's representative works, an autobiographical novel, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1984. The book is set against the backdrop of French colonial life in Vietnam, depicting the deep and hopeless love between a poor French girl and a wealthy Chinese young man.

About the Author
Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) was one of the most famous contemporary French female novelists, playwrights, and film artists. She was born on April 4, 1914, in Gia Định, Vietnam, to parents who were primary school teachers. Her father died when she was four, and the hardships of her childhood and her mother's tragic fate influenced her entire life.
Duras began her literary journey with the novel Les Impudents (1943). Her works are not only rich in content and diverse in genre but also pay particular attention to style, possessing a novel and unique flair. Her early novel Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950) fully reflects the impoverished life of her childhood, and many of her other works also take the social realities of Indochina as their subject. Works such as Le Marin de Gibraltar (1952) are filled with cinematic images and colloquial dialogue, and thus most were adapted into films; later novels such as Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia (1953), Moderato Cantabile (1958), and Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964) are adept at breaking traditional narrative patterns, integrating fiction with reality, which led her to be considered a New Novelist for a time. In fact, her novels only resemble the New Novel in their technique, emphasizing the poetic and musical qualities of style, but are quite different in conception. In her works, she depicts the opposition between rich and poor and human desires, revealing social reality in a unique way. Duras also achieved remarkable success in theater and film. She published three collections of plays in 1965, 1968, and 1984, and won the Grand Prix du Théâtre de l'Académie française in 1983. As a member of the important French film movement "Left Bank Cinema," she not only wrote excellent screenplays such as Hiroshima mon amour (1960) and Une aussi longue absence (1961) but also began directing herself in 1965. Starting with the creation of the excellent film India Song (1974), one or two films were released each year, and many of them won international awards.