Jérôme loves Alissa; Alissa loves him too, but turns that love into a spiritual trial, refusing earthly happiness in pursuit of purity, sacrifice, and the narrow path suggested by the Gospel phrase of the title. 

The novel has that crystalline French intensity where the emotional disaster is conducted in letters, sermons, glances, gardens, and sentences that feel almost too composed to survive. Gide is interested in the difference between holiness and repression, devotion and cruelty, self-mastery and self-erasure. It is not a big novel, but it is a sharp one: all inward pressure, moral anguish, adolescent absolutism, and the dangerous fantasy that suffering might make love more true.

A good one for readers of French modernism, religious crisis, doomed love, Mauriac, Radiguet, early twentieth-century European fiction, and novels where desire gets dressed up as virtue and then starts doing real harm.

Vintage Penguin paperback edition, published in Penguin Books in 1952. Complete and unabridged orange Penguin, priced 2/-. Fair to good second-hand condition, with visible age toning, creasing, edgewear, rubbing, and wear to spine/corners. A handled but pleasing early Penguin copy.