The Nobel Prize winner's exquisite new novel—his first in over a decade. At the age of 88, Claude Simon, a Nobel Prize-winning author and a cultural icon in France, has written a Proustian novel, intermingling the memories of youth and of old age. His madeleine is the trolley of the book's title, the transport that took him to and from his school every morning of his childhood. Describing it in exquisite detail, the opening pages are among the marvels of modern French prose. We are magically drawn into Simon's childhood with its promises and dangers. As the book progresses, we move from childhood into old age and our narrator is now on a different form of transport, a mobile hospital bed, beginning a different voyage into old age. The combination of the two creates a splendid fugue, one that has been highly praised by all the French critics and made the book into an immediate bestseller in France.