Time Well Lost: Carlini Classics Brings Back Proust’s In Search of Lost Time

October 3, 2026

A new seven-volume series of the novel about memory and time.

New York, NY — October 3, 2026 — A bite of cake dipped in tea. A childhood bedroom at night. A familiar face at a party, years later. Marcel Proust showed how moments this small can bring a whole lost world back to life. Carlini Classics today announces a new series of all seven volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (in French, À la recherche du temps perdu), one of the most celebrated novels ever written.

Proust published the novel between 1913 and 1927. A narrator looks back on his life to understand love, desire, friendship, art, and time itself. Along the way, he paints a vivid, often funny picture of French society before and during World War I.

The series opens with Swann’s Way, home of the book’s most famous scene. The narrator tastes a madeleine (a small cake) dipped in tea, and his childhood comes flooding back. In In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, he grows up, falls in love for the first time, and spends a summer at the seaside. The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah take him into the glittering, snobbish world of Paris high society and its hidden lives. The Prisoner and The Fugitive follow his jealous, all-consuming love for Albertine, and what is left after she is gone. The series ends with Time Regained. There, the narrator realizes that the past isn't truly lost: art can recover it and give it meaning.

“Proust discovered that our most private memories can hold an entire world,” said Charles Carlini, founder of Casa Carlini. “His great subject is time, but his gift is making time something you can feel, through a taste, a room, a voice, a glance. These books remind us that the past is not gone. It is waiting for the moment that brings it back.”

Each cover features early modern painting in soft, faded color. The covers were designed by Jenny Lim of California State University, East Bay, with help from Finn McElhatten of the University of San Francisco.

Carlini Classics hopes readers will come to Proust as a companion rather than a homework assignment. He is a guide to how ordinary moments become meaningful. In Search of Lost Time asks what remains once time has passed. Its answer: more than we think, if we learn how to remember.

The Marcel Proust series from Carlini Classics is available now from Casa Carlini, major booksellers, and Amazon.