From the Nobel Prize winning author of The Counterfitters and The Immoralist.

Urien's Voyage is an allegorical account of a sea voyage. From the stagnant, teeming waters of the Sargasso to the frozen Arctic, Gide charts in prose the fantastic journey of the Orion and the sexual and moral transformations of those aboard. The temptations, suffering, and surroundings of Urien and his companions are described with an extraordinary profusion of detail, yet the pilgrims can never be sure of the reality of their experiences.

The eponymous Urien is, we now know, the young André Gide himself. Written under the spell of the great French Symbolist poet Mallarmé, the novel is an illustration of both the techniques and the aesthetic credo of the Symbolist movement. Although written early in the career of this key French thinker and Nobel Prize-Winner, Urien's Voyage is now regarded as a significant work, articulating the powerful tension between sexuality and morality that would preoccupy Gide in his better-known later novels.

'Substantial and virile … purity, austerity and abstraction rise to a peak.' – The Nobel Prize Library

'Sensuality, sexuality and pride … a work of art.' – Statesman

'All of French thought in these past thirty years must be defined in relation to Gide.' – Jean-Paul Sartre

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ANDRÉ GIDE (1869–1951) was born in Paris, France. He was a writer, humanist, and moralist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. Throughout his life, as articulated in his writing, he battled with the public perception of homosexuality as well as his own understanding of it. He was author of over 50 volumes of fiction, poetry, plays, criticism, biography, belles lettres, and translations. Among his best-known works are Fruits of the Earth, The Counterfitters and The Immoralist. Gide died in 1951.