{"product_id":"2026100012115-secondhand-madame-bovary","title":"Madame Bovary","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Good\u003cbr\u003eJacket: N\/A\u003cbr\u003ePages: Yellowed\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFew novels have captured the suffocating tragedy of unfulfilled desire quite like Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert's masterwork of 19th-century French realism. The story chronicles Emma Bovary, a romantically idealistic doctor's wife living in the provincial French countryside, who, disillusioned by the mundane realities of marriage and rural life, pursues a series of passionate love affairs and reckless expenditures in a desperate bid to live the grand, passionate existence she has only ever encountered in novels. With merciless precision, Flaubert dissects the gap between romantic fantasy and bourgeois reality, constructing a narrative that is at once a devastating character study and a searing critique of an entire social class.\n\nFlaubert's prose is a landmark achievement in the history of the novel — sculpted, ironic, and achingly precise — earning him a reputation as one of the greatest stylists in Western literature. His revolutionary technique of *style indirect libre* (free indirect discourse) allows the reader to inhabit Emma's self-deceptions with uncomfortable intimacy, blurring the line between author and character. First published in 1857 and famously prosecuted for obscenity, Madame Bovary endures not merely as a period piece but as a timeless portrait of the human cost of living for illusions. The question Flaubert ultimately poses — whether society or the dreamer herself is to blame — remains as urgent and unanswered as ever.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51070622335195,"sku":"2026100012115-SECONDHAND","price":12.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/4442241f-0113-4421-bd63-dc9c25ae2499.png?v=1794188110","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026100012115-secondhand-madame-bovary","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}