90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books

In October Nights, Gerard de Nerval takes us on a gentle meander through nighttime Paris – a dreamlike journey towards getting lost. Also included in this volume is Sylvie, his haunting novella of love and memory, the ‘masterpiece’ that inspired Proust to write In Search of Lost Time. Together, these works by the French poet, visionary and pioneering modernist are a testament to the power of jewelled thinking, and an inspiration for flaneurs and romantics everywhere.

Gerard de Nerval was born Gerard Labrunie in 1808, in Paris, the son of an army doctor. A precocious poet, he published a number of volumes of political verse during his adolescence and gained fame at the age of nineteen for his translation of Goethe's Faust. He was one of the young Romantics gathered around Victor Hugo, and served for a long time as a ghost-writer of Alexandre Dumas. Between 1852 and 1855, in a state of ever-mounting financial and mental disarray, Nerval published the bulk of the work on which his fame rests: The Illuminati, October Nights, Castles in Bohemia, The Daughters of Fire, Sylvie, The Chimeras, and Aurelia. Nerval died on 26 January 1855, by his own hand.