The Ripening Seed (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

In Ripening Seed Colette captures that precious, painful moment when childhood retreats at the onslaught of dawning knowledge and desire. Philippe and Vinca are childhood friends. In the glowing days and mist-filled nights of late summer on the Brittany coast, their deep-rooted love for each other loses its childhood simplicity. Philippe is destined to learn from experience, while Vinca, like all women the world over, is blessed, or cursed, with instinctive powers of perception and wisdom.
Sharp and sad, haunted on every page by the sights, smells and sounds of the sea coast, this evocation of wounded, and wounding, innocence will be read with tears of sympathy and deep, lasting pleasure.