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Gigi
  • Published: 4 June 2026
  • ISBN: 9781802060355
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336
Categories:

Gigi

Formats & editions
Paperback
20 Oct 2026
EBook
4 June 2026
Paperback
5 Jan 2022
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Colette's most famous novella, in a vivid new Penguin Classics translation

‘Fine teeth, my girl. With teeth like that I’d have gobbled up Paris and the rest of the world.'

Gigi, a teenage girl in fin-de-siècle Paris, is being groomed by her family to become a high-class courtesan, just like her aunt and grandmother before her. But despite their best efforts, their timid protégée may have other ideas for her future...

Colette's famous novella is a sly and delicate depiction of exploitation and resistance, and is paired here with the wonderful short novel ‘The Cat’.
  • Published: 4 June 2026
  • ISBN: 9781802060355
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336
Categories:

About the author

Colette

Colette, the creator of Claudine, Cheri and Gigi, and one of France’s outstanding writers, had a long, varied and active life. She was born in Burgundy on 1873 into a home overflowing with dogs, cats and children, and educated at the local village school. At the age of twenty she moved to Paris with her first husband, the notorious writer and critic Henry Gauthier-Villas (Willy). By locking her in her room, Willy forced Collette to write her first novels (the Claudine sequence), which he published under his name. They were an instant success. Colettte left Willy in 1906 and worked in music-halls as an actor and dancer. She had a love affair with Napoleon’s niece, married twice more, had a baby at 40 and at 47. Her writing, which included novels, portraits, essays and a large body of autobiographical prose, was admired by Proust and Gide. She was the first woman President of the Académie Goncourt, and when she died, aged 81, she was given a state funeral and buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
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Also by Colette

Chéri
Claudine's House
Cheri
The Vagabond
Chéri and The End of Chéri
The Collected Stories Of Colette
Gigi and The Cat
See all

Praise for Gigi

Everything that Colette touched became human

The Times

This most French of all French writers tells us how love sometimes binds and keeps a woman from breathing freely or how it may shape and support her . . . One thinks of her as the female voice of Paris

New York Times

By turns revolutionary and retrograde, liberated and conservative, a traditionalist who defied labels and loved a title, Colette was nothing if not contradictory. Both her life and her body of work were epic

Sadie Stein, New York Times

Colette was in herself a French experiment in life. Her writing was born of her insatiable curiosity for life and love

Agnès Poirier, The Times

The most beloved French writer of all time

BBC Culture