Most readers, if they're honest, admit to skipping over occasional passages of Proust's A la Recherche, and Vintage has now facilitated anyone who wants to jump to the end to find out what, er, happens. Beware, however: the final volume won't make a lot of sense unless you have followed the narrator, Marcel, through his labyrinthine reflections on the operations of memory, time and his past selves, filtered through microscopic observations of a dying social order - the French upper-middle class and aristocracy - as the Belle Epoque is overshadowed by the first World War. But Time Regained offers great rewards: the multiple layering and convergence of all preceding themes, emphasising the "notion of Time embodied, of years past but not separated from us". This fully revised edition includes an index of themes and characters. And if that still doesn't entice, there's always Raoul Ruiz's ambitious film version.