Eugenie Grandet

Chosen by Rose Tremain as her Orange Inheritance. This edition is published in association with the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Books shape our lives and transform the way we see ourselves and each other. The best books are timeless and continue to be relevant generation after generation. Vintage Classics asked the winners of The Orange Prize for Fiction which books they would pass onto the next generation and why. Rose Tremain chose Eugenie Grandet.

Monsieur Grandet is a very rich man whose chief care is his gold. He runs his household with exacting miserly attention and his wife and daughter suffer a Spartan existence. On the evening of his daughter Eugenie's twenty-third birthday his foppish nephew Charles suddenly arrives from Paris. Eugenie has never known passion. Now, in an instant, she falls in love and her life is changed forever. Monsieur Grandet will not countenance his daughter's marriage to her penniless cousin and Eugenie's determination to follow her heart leads her into direct conflict with her father.

Honore de Balzac's (1799–1850) masterpiece Comedie humaine comprises 91 separate works, including Eugenie Grandet, Pere Goirot, The Wild Ass's Skin, and The Black Sheep. Many of his novels were critically acclaimed on publication, and went on to profoundly influence authors from Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert to Charles Dickens and Henry James. Rose Tremain is the author of Music & Silence, which won a Whitbread Award; Restoration, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Road Home, which won the Orange Prize; and Trespass. She has judged the Booker Prize twice.