"Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth."
--Graham Greene

The Modern Library's fifth volume of Proust's masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu, contains both The Captive (1923) and The Fugitive (1925). In The Captive, Proust's narrator describes living with his lover, Albertine, in his mother's Paris apartment. He finds himself, by turns, falling out of love with Albertine and obsessing about whom she may or may not love. In The Fugitive, the narrator loses Albertine forever. It is during his sojourn in Venice that he receives a fateful telegram from Gilberte, Swann's red-haired daughter. Rich with irony, the story inspires meditations on desire, sexual love, music, and the art of introspection. Graham Greene wrote, "For those who began to write at the end of the twenties or the beginning of the thirties, there were two great inescapable influences: Proust and Freud, who are mutually complementary."

The final volume of a new, definitive text of À la recherche du temps perdu was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989. For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to take into account the new French editions.