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Angelo

Giono: he's a god. I rank him with Chateaubriand and Proust.

Each page of Giono may be read as a poem.

Giono's images of Provence have a hypnotic violence akin to Van Gogh at his most vivid, but he also provides a great story, not least one of love.

JEAN GIONO (1895-1970) was born in Manosque, Provence, the son of an Italian cobbler, and lived there most of his life. He supported his family working as a clerk for eighteen years ( with an interval serving in the ranks in the First World War) before his first two novels were published, thanks to the generosity of André Gide, to critical acclaim. He went on to write thirty novels and numerous essays and stories, as well as poetry and plays. In 1953 he was awarded the Prix Monégasque for his collective work. The same year, he made a prescient contribution to the "ecological" movement with his novella The Man who Planted Trees. This, and his novel The Horseman on the Roof, which was made into a highly-acclaimed film starring Olivier Martinez and Juliette Binoche, are also published by Harvill. Jean Giono married in 1920 and had two daughters. 
 
Angelo is the first of a group of four novels all featuring the same cavalry-officer hero. It was not the first to be written: having completed the three others, Mort d'un personage, Le Hussard sur le toit (The Horseman on the Roof), and Le Bonheur fou, the author returned to his sketch for Le Hussard sur le toit and fleshed it out to provide the hero with a previous history.

Angelo, a young Hussar colonel and expert swordsman, has had to escape into France from his native Piedmont after killing an Austrian police-spy in a duel. Travelling the roads of Provence disguised as a French workman, he falls in with an eccentric marquise, Céline de Théus, and becomes a guest at the chateau, where she lives with her elderly brother Laurent. It is in the early years of the nineteenth century, the era of seditious movements to unseat those in power and destabilise monarchies - and no one has a greater appetite for fishing in these troubled waters than Laurent, whose years are belied by his youthful energy on horseback. Now he has married a raven-haired beauty in the prime of youth, and she is not indifferent to this new Italian guest. Angelo is the archetypal novel of romance and intrigue, which Jean Giono vests with a psychological depth that transcends the genre. Readers of Angelo's and Pauline's adventurers in The Horseman on the Roof will welcome the opportunity to meet them both in this novel which first introduces them.

The Horseman On The Roof

Dazzling! From the first to the last frame, Jean-Paul Rappeneau sweeps across the screen with this huge epic. A work of art.

With The Horseman, Giono reveals himself as one of the most important novelists in Europe today.

JEAN GIONO was born in 1895 in Manosque, Provence, and lived there most of his life. He was sent to the front in early 1915, an experience he refused to repeat in the Second World War when he was briefly arrested for declaring himself a pacifist. For eighteen years he supported his parents, Jean-Antoine and Pauline, by working as a bank clerk before his first two novels were published, thanks to the generosity of André Gide, to critical acclaim. He went on to write thirty novels and numerous essays and stories. Placed in 1944 on the black list of national writers, Giono was later awarded the Prix Monégasque for his collective work. He died in October 1970.

In the white heat the sky is opaque, the air leaden and the light intense. A single cavalryman wonders at the oppressive atmosphere of the unfamiliar countryside he is entering. Exile from his Italian homeland as well as an innate, stubborn pride compel him onward, into the heart of Provence and into the acute cholera epidemic which ravaged the country in the 1830s. 
 
Giono here directs a hallucinatory, lyrical narrative in which the mortal odours, the violent contractions of those who meet with the disease and the fear of a people confronted with insuperable natural forces are palpable. Death pervades the novel, but Angelo does not cease journeying, dodging blockades and quarantine imposed by troops - even seeking temporary refuge on the roofs of one town - determined to find his childhood friend, Giuseppe. Others join him on the road, and leave him. Only the young woman, Pauline de Théus, who calmly receives the intruder who one night descends from the roofs, proves a worthy travelling companion.

The Song Of The World

Giono gives us the world we live in, a world of dream, passion and reality

There is still dew on this world of Giono's; he looks out on it and records his impressions of it almost as if he were the first man seeing it. The emotions of his people are refreshingly forthright and uncomplicated, and in his pages man stands in his natural relation to the animate and inanimate world about him

Jean Giono is one of the giants of modern French letters. He is the poet of the French countryside and of the French peasant, of man and nature, and the relation of man to nature. His books stand apart; there is nothing else in all French literature quite like them

As with Faulkner, we have blood, night, violence, myth. To read Giono is to be immersed

Jean Giono (1895-1970) was born in Manosque, Provence, the son of an Italian cobbler, and lived there most of his life. He supported his family working as a bank clerk for eighteen years (with an interval serving in the ranks in the First World War) before his first two novels were published, thanks to the generosity of André Gide to critical acclaim. He went on to write thirty novels and numerous essays and stories, as well as poetry and plays. In 1953 he was awarded the Prix Monégasque for his collective work. The same year, he made a prescient contribution to the "ecological" movement with his novella The Man who Planted Trees. This, and his novel The Horseman on the Roof, which was made into a highly acclaimed film starring Olivier Martinez and Juliette Binoche, are among this author's titles also published by Harvill. Jean Giono married in 1920 and had two daughters.

Of Sailor's twin sons, the elder is dead and the younger is missing.A simple woodsman, Sailor resolves to find the boy, fearing the worst.Soon after he and his friend Antonio set off, they stumble across a blind girl giving birth. This strange circumstance proves typical of their journey into the heart of the forest. Sailor and Antonio discover that, though the lost Twin is alive, he is the target of a manhunt. As Sailor and Antonio attempt to rescue Twin, the adventures unravel at a breathtaking speed. The net tightens around the three men until one of them is trapped and killed. And only then does the real action of this remarkable picaresque novel begin. In Giono's universe, no murder shall go unavenged. 
 
This tale of primitive love and vendetta is cast in a timeless landscape of river, mountain and forest. With its taut, fast-paced story and pastoral setting, The Song of the World is another triumph from the celebrated author of The Man Who Planted Trees.

Jean Giono

Harry Brockway

Barbara Bray

Richard Mabey

A novel from the Vintage Earth collection

'And so, with great care, he planted his hundred acorns' 
 
While hiking through the wild lavender in a wind-swept, desolate valley in Provence, a man comes across a solitary shepherd called Elzéard Bouffier. Staying with him, he watches Elzéard sorting and then planting hundreds of acorns as he walks through the wilderness. 
 
Ten years later, after surviving the First World War, he visits the shepherd again. A young forest is slowly spreading over the valley - Elzéard has continued his work. Year after year the narrator returns to see the miracle being created: a verdant, green landscape that is testament to one man's creative instinct. miracle he is gradually creating: a verdant, green landscape that is a testament to one man's creative instinct. 
 
'I love the humanity of this story and how one man's efforts can change the future for so many' Michael Morpurgo, Independent 
 
VINTAGE EARTH is a series of books that reveals our ever-changing relationship with the environment. These are stories old and young, set in worlds real or imagined, that allow us to explore our connection to the natural world. Transformative, wild, surprising and essential, these novels take on the most urgent story of our times.

Jean Giono

Books by Jean Giono

Articles featuring Jean Giono

Uplifting climate books to inspire hope about the planet’s future

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