Swann's Way is one of the preeminent novels of childhood – a sensitive boy's impressions of his family and neighbors, all brought dazzlingly back to life years later by the famous taste of a madeleine. The first volume of the work that established Proust as one of the finest voices of the modern age – satirical, skeptical, confiding, and endlessly varied in his response to the human condition – Swann's Way also stands on its own as a perfect rendering of a life in art, of the past recreated through memory.