The Counterfeiters

About this book

Published in 1925, The Counterfeiters is André Gide's most ambitious novel and a landmark of modernist fiction. Set in the streets and schools of Paris, the story weaves together the lives of a group of adolescent boys, their bourgeois families, and a novelist named Édouard who is writing a book called — The Counterfeiters.

At its heart, the novel is a meditation on authenticity and deception. Who are the real counterfeiters? The boys who circulate fake coins? The adults who construct false identities and hollow marriages? Or all of us, endlessly performing versions of ourselves we do not quite believe in?

Gide pioneered a radical narrative structure that broke every convention of his time. Characters appear and disappear without resolution. The narrator intrudes, questions himself, and admits uncertainty. Édouard's diary appears inside the novel, a book within the book, blurring the line between fiction and reality in ways that anticipate postmodern literature by decades.

This is a novel about the impossibility of knowing other people, about the gap between who we are and who we pretend to be, and about the strange alchemy by which a writer transforms lived experience into art. Scandalous, innovative, and deeply human, The Counterfeiters remains one of the great novels of the twentieth century.

This audiobook is in the public domain and free forever. LibriCommons produces free, high-quality audiobooks of classic literature for everyone.