An international best-seller with more than one million copies in print, The Lover has been acclaimed by critics all over the world. Set in the prewar Indochina of Marguerite Duras's childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover in the waning days of France's colonial empire. This edition includes an introduction by Maxine Hong Kingston that looks back at Duras's world from an intriguing new perspective -- that of a visitor to Vietnam today.