In Search of Lost Time

The longest novel in the French literary canon and the most sustained exploration of consciousness in all of fiction, In Search of Lost Time spans seven volumes and approximately 1.5 million words — more than twice the length of War and Peace. Marcel Proust published the work in installments between 1913 and 1927, constructing an entire world from involuntary memory, beginning with the narrator's madeleine dipped in tea. T.S. Eliot judged it the greatest fiction of the 20th century. Contemporary neuroscientists have since confirmed that Proust's description of sensory-triggered recall is anatomically accurate — a novelist who understood how the brain works before the science existed to prove it.