Jean Giono

This is the first English-language translation of Jean Giono's 1947 masterpiece, Un Roi Sans Divertissement, A King Without Diversion , which takes its title from Pascal's famous remark that "a man without diversions is a man with misery to spare." Giono's novel is an existential detective story set in a snowbound mountain village in the mid-nineteenth century. Deep in winter, inhabitants of the village begin mysteriously to disappear, and Langlois is sent to investigate. A manhunt begins and Langlois brings the case to what appears to be a successful conclusion. Some years later, again in winter, Langlois returns to the village, now having been promoted to the position of captain of the brigade that protects the inhabitants and their property from wolves. Langlois is a charismatic and enigmatic kingly figure who fascinates the villagers he has been sent to protect, and yet he feels set apart from them and from himself, and as he pursues the wolf who is preying on the village, he identifies more and more with the murderer who had been his earlier target. The splendid, tormented Langlois is very much at the center of the novel, but he is surrounded by a full cast of remarkable characters. There is Sausage, the "saucy" and "sassy" cafe owner; Fre de ric II, the brave sawmill owner who tracks the killer; Ravanel Georges, an almost-victim of the murderer; the potbellied Royal Prosecutor with his profound knowledge of "men's souls"; the murdered Marie Chazottes and her "peppery blood"; and an exotic woman from the "very high" places in Mexico who befriends Langlois and Sausage. In Alyson Waters's outstanding translation the many voices in this wonderfully inventive and diverting novel by one of the most perennially popular of modern French writers come to brilliant life in English.

"The Serpent of Stars (Le Serpent d'etoiles, 1933; reprinted 1999 Grasset) takes place in rural southern France in the early part of the twentieth century. The novel's elusive narrative thread ties landscape to character to a greater expanse just beyond our grasp. The narrator encounters the shepherding community and, glimpse by glimpse, their way of life is revealed to us. The novel culminates in a large shepherds' gathering where an improvised Shepherd's Play - a kind of creation myth that includes in its cast The River, The Sea, The Man , and The Mountain - is enacted. The work's proto-environmental world view as well as its hybrid form - part play, part novel - makes The Serpent of Stars contemporary. W.S. Merwin's "Green Fields" begins, "By this part of the century few are left who believe / in the animals for they are not there in the carved parts / of them served on plates and the pleas from slatted trucks ." This novel leaves the reader believing not only in the animals, but in the terrain they are part of, the people who tend them, and the life all these elements together compose."--BOOK JACKET.

"The Solitude of Compassion paints a glorious portrait of small-town life in Provence, drawing on one village's cast of characters: the priest, the shepherds, the cafe regulars and its owner - radiant, wise, and decent, at times immoral and coarse, occasionally visionary. Giono writes of a friendship forged in a battlefield trench in the midst of World War I; of an old man's discovery of the transcendent song of the world; of the profound connection between man and beast; of human compassion; and of what lies beyond. Every inch of Giono's Provence breathes and glows with life in these twenty interlinked stories. His feeling for the human condition and almost uncanny connection to the land pours out of his lyrical prose, whether recreating the odor of the earth damp with fresh blood, the voice of the wind, or a man's private language when speaking to a wounded bird."--BOOK JACKET.

Marceau and Ange Jason, two brothers tied by love after a harsh upbringing, suffer their downfall in a struggle for dominance resulting in sibling rivalry gone terribly awry.

This novel tell of Monica Crawshaw relationship with two men - with the sensual, selfish Hamish McPhail who brutally betrays her, and with Victor Towers, a young man of gentle disposition with whom she discovers love of a strength and depth she has never known before. But driven by distress, Monica commits a grave wrong against Victor. She practices upon him, and finally upon his parents, a tragic deception which has repercussions for many years to come, and which, despite her attempts to justify it to herself, weighs heavily upon her conscience.

A French widower, who plants 100 acorns each day and restores the landscape over the 30 years of his work.