'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 Elzeard Bouffier. Staying with him, he watches Elzeard 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 - Elzeard 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.

First published in 1979, this richly documented study of French development from the early nineteenth century to the present day is of particular imporatnce to students both of history and economics. Francis Caron moves as confidently through the fields of current economic policy and modern economics as he does through the traditional subject matter of French nineteenth-century economic history. His book incorporates the mass of research that has appeared in monograph and periodical form in recent years, making it accessible for the first time to the English-speaking reader.

First published in 1979, this richly documented study of French development from the early nineteenth century to the present day is of particular importance to students both of history and economics. Francis Caron moves as confidently through the fields of current economic policy and modern economics as he does through the traditional subject matter of French nineteenth-century economic history. His book incorporates the mass of research that has appeared in monograph and periodical form in recent years, making it accessible for the first time to the English-speaking reader.

'Anouilh is a poet, but not of words: he is a poet of words-acted, of scenes-set, of players-performing' Peter Brook Jean Anouilh, one of the foremost French playwrights of the twentieth century, replaced the mundane realist works of the previous era with his innovative dramas, which exploit fantasy, tragic passion, scenic poetry and cosmic leaps in time and space. Antigone, his best-known play, was performed in 1944 in Nazi-controlled Paris and provoked fierce controversy. In defying the tyrant Creon and going to her death, Antigone conveyed to Anouilh's compatriots a covert message of heroic resistance; but the author's characterisaation of Creon also seemed to exonerate Marshal Petain and his fellow collaborators. More ambivalent than his ancient model, Sophocles, Anouilh uses Greek myth to explore the disturbing moral dilemmas of our times. Commentary and notes by Ted Freeman.

The narrator of this allegorical tale, journeying by foot across the barren plains of the lower Alps, has his thirst assuaged by the well water drawn by the shepherd Elzéard Bouffier. Thus begins the subtle parable that Giono weaves of the life-giving shepherd who chooses to live alone and carry out the work of God. Over forty years the desolate hills and lifeless villages which so oppressed the traveller are transformed by the dedication of one man. All with the help of a few acorns. Written in the 1950s, Giono’s brief story, which he hoped would help set in motion a worldwide reforestation programme, had a message ahead of its time. It has inspired many readers over the years to rediscover the harmonies of the countryside and prevent its wilful destruction. This edition is enhanced by Harry Brockway’s delightful engravings and by an afterword by Alyne Giono.

From the bestselling author of The Lover, Marguerite Duras's haunting memoir of suffering and survival in a time when Europe was torn asunder Written in 1944 and first published in 1985, Duras's riveting account of life in Paris during the Nazi occupation and the first months of liberation depicts the harrowing realities of World War II-era France "with a rich conviction enhanced by [a] spare, almost arid, technique" (Julian Barnes, The Washington Post Book World ). Duras, by then married and part of a French resistance network headed by Francois Mitterand, tells of nursing her starving husband back to health after his return from Bergen-Belsen, interrogating a suspected collaborator, and playing a game of cat and mouse with a Gestapo officer who was attracted to her. The result is "more than one woman's diary . . . [it is] a haunting portrait of a time and a place and also a state of mind" (The New York Times).

The village of Montaillou was the last stronghold of the cult of Catharism in medieval France. Under the inquisition of Bishop Fournier members of this sect were persecuted and some burnt at the stake, and the interrogations about the way they lived were chronicled in a Register. From this document Ladurie has reconstructed an intriguing account of everyday peasant life in a medieval village. Montaillou gives us a unique glimpse into how people really lived 700 years ago: from their homes and the food they ate to their body language and attitudes to sex.

'Maryse Conde is an extraordinary storyteller who brings the history of an African kingdom alive as vividly as if it existed today. . . This is a great novel: unputdownable and unforgettable' Bernardine Evaristo Winner of the Alternative Nobel Prize for Literature 2018 The bestselling epic novel of family, treachery, rivalry, religious fervour and the turbulent fate of a royal African dynasty It is 1797 and the African kingdom of Segu, born of blood and violence, is at the height of its power. Yet Dousika Traore, the king's most trusted advisor, feels nothing but dread. Change is coming. From the East, a new religion, Islam. From the West, the slave trade. These forces will tear his country, his village and the lives of his beloved sons apart, in Maryse Conde's glittering epic. 'Rich and colorful and glorious. It sprawls over continents and centuries to find its way into the reader's heart' - Maya Angelou 'A stunning reaffirmation of Africa and its peoples... It's a starburst' - John A. Williams

Translated by Barbara Bray from the French version of the Albanian by Jusuf Vrioni At the heart of the Sultan's vast empire stands the mysterious Palace of Dreams. Inside, the dreams of every citizen are collected, sorted and interpreted in order to identify the 'master-dreams' that will provide the clues to the Empire's destiny and that of its Monarch. An entire nation's consciousness is thus meticulously laid bare and at the mercy of its government... The Palace of Dreams is Kadare's macabre vision of tyranny and oppression, and was banned upon publication in Albania in 1981.

In the early 1970s Harold Pinter joined forces with director Joseph Losey and Proust scholar Barbara Bray to develop a screenplay of Proust's masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past. Pinter took more than a year to conceive and write the screenplay and called the experience "the best working year of my life." Although never produced, Harold Pinter's The Proust Screenplay is considered one of the greatest adaptations for the cinema ever written.

With fidelity to Proust's text, the screenplay is an extraordinary re-creation by one of the leading playwrights of our time. It is, in its way, a unique collaboration between two extraordinary writers united across more than half a century and two different cultures by a special concern for time and memory.

When the new Egyptian Pharaoh decrees that he does not want a pyramid built in his honour his advisers are aghast. It is their firm belief that peace and prosperity only make the people more difficult to control - they must be kept under the whip. So the Pharaoh agrees to the construction of a pyramid colossal beyond imagining, an edifice that crushes dozens of people as each block is added and which inexorably drains the lifeblood from the country. As Egypt builds its monument to death, its neighbours plot and gloat...

Internationally renowned psychoanalyst and writer Julia Kristeva presents a critical allegory for our time. In an imaginative departure from both her theoretical work and her recent novel, Kristeva takes us to a mythical, postindustrial landscape in which the boundaries between East and West, civilization and barbarism, and good and evil are erased.

An international bestseller and winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, "The Ogre" is a masterful tale of innocence, perversion, and obsession. It follows the passage of strange, gentle Abel Tiffauges from submissive schoolboy to "ogre" of the Nazi school at the castle of Kaltenborn, taking us deeper into the dark heart of fascism than any novel since "The Tin Drum." Until the very last page, when Abel meets his mystic fate in the collapsing ruins of the Third Reich, it shocks us, dazzles us, and above all holds us spellbound.

Julia Kristeva's dazzling fictional debut is an intellectual adventure, full of vitality, sensuousness, and sustained lyricism. Reminiscent of The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir's 1954 masterpiece, The Samurai brilliantly reconstructs a pivotal era of postwar French history - Paris in the late 1960s - and at the same time records the political disillusionment and ferment of a generation. In a brisk narrative spanning three continents, the novel follows an array of passionate and promiscuous intellectual warriors - the "samurai" for whom "writing is the only lasting act of pleasure and war combined". Readers will instantly recognize finely sketched and often searing portraits of some of this century's most influential minds: Lacan, Derrida, Barthes, Althusser, and many others. With an authorial voice that modulates between the erotic and the meditative, the ironic and the rancorous, The Samurai moves from Paris to Mao's China - where revolutionary idealism collides with cold pragmatism - to New York and back to Paris. Over a twenty-five year period, the characters experience countless battles involving love, depression, maternity, and disease, while the various themes of the text - language, prison, madness, emotional ruptures - are brought to fruition with astounding insight. Kristeva's contributions to psychoanalysis, semiotics, and literary theory have earned her widespread international acclaim. Already published to positive reviews in France, this is a novel whose enormous energy derives from the juxtaposition of vital ideas set on a broad historical canvas. Fluid and captivating, The Samurai brilliantly illuminates both the constantly shifting terrain of human relationships and themanifold psychological entanglements of the Left Bank intellectuals. The result is a novel that will enhance Kristeva's stature as one of our most versatile and creative thinkers.

There are ninety-nine names for God in the Koran, is it possible that there is a secret one-hundredth name? In this tale of magic and mystery, of love and danger, Balthasar's ultimate quest is to find the secret that could save the world. Before the dawn of the apocalyptic 'Year of the Beast' in 1666, Balthasar Embriaco, a Genoese Levantine merchant, sets out on an adventure that will take him across the breadth of the civilised world, from Constantinople, through the Mediterranean, to London shortly before the Great Fire. Balthasar's urgent quest is to track down a copy of one of the rarest and most coveted books ever printed, a volume called 'The Hundredth Name', its contents are thought to be of vital importance to the future of the world. There are ninety-nine names for God in the Koran, and merely to know this most secret hundredth name will, Balthasar believes, ensure his salvation.

The award-winning novelist and author of the international bestseller "Racism Explained to My Daughter" uses his own experience to illuminate the experience of the Other in his adopted land -- and everywhere. A Moroccan who emigrated to France in 1971, Tahar Ben Jelloun draws upon his own encounters with racism along with his insights as a practicing psychologist and gifted novelist to elucidate the racial divisions that plague contemporary society. In a modern France where openly racist leaders such as National Front spokesman Jean-Marie Le Pen have made significant strides toward broad popular acceptance, Ben Jelloun's book is more topical now than ever. His profound and compelling appeal for tolerance -- in both public discourse and the law -- is a passionate yet reasoned argument that racism simply does not make sense in the multicultural world of today.

"French Hospitality" confronts issues of international resonance: the relationship of a formerly colonized people to their onetime colonizers, the encounter between Islam and the modern Judeo-Christian West, and the status of the non-European minorities in Europe today. Underlying these issues is a heartfelt nostalgia for simple, traditional North African hospitality as practiced since time immemorial by a relatively poor and unsophisticated society. Ben Jelloun supplements this rather noble ideal of generosity and welcoming by borrowing the philosophical concept of hospitality -- the opening of oneself to another -- from the works of Emmanuel L?vinas and Jacques Derrida in order to illustrate the moral conception of a nation's unconditional acceptance of foreigners. Isn't the belief in welcoming strangers a fundamental mark of civilization? In a political climate where increasingly repressive immigration laws are a national trend as well as an international phenomenon, he contends, it is not surprising that racism has gained a foothold. Most hurt by racist polemic and politics, he points out, are children of immigrants -- born in France, their memories are those of the French people, and they deserve to be treated with the full respect afforded to any citizen.

With his elegant and imaginative prose, Ben Jelloun shows us both racism's face and the immigrant's heartbreak; but he also evokes the wind of freedom and the ideal of hospitality, and with this gesture offers a kind of hope in extricating ourselves from racism's recidivist incoherencies.

This sequel to Julia Kristeva's celebrated allegory The Old Man and the Wolves returns to the corrupt seaside resort of a mythical town, where the boundaries between East and West, civilization and barbarism, and good and evil are erased. Part mystery, part meditation, this engrossing tale features the return of Parisian amateur detective and newspaper reporter Stephanie Delacour (Kristeva's alter ego), drawn into the mystery of a friend's murder. The story opens with the gruesome discovery of the decapitated body of gifted translator Gloria Harrison. Delacour finds herself participating in the investigation in the company of Detective Superintendent Northrup Rilsky. As the mystery unfolds, Delacour veers away from Rilsky's investigation, on to a trail that leads to the real killer. Kristeva uses the classic thriller genre to animate the themes that run through her work as a linguist and philosopher. While Stephanie Delacour probes a brilliant gallery of suspects, we read between the lines some of the sorrows and dilemmas that are the focus of Kristeva's own life and work: motherhood and the complex relationship between mother and child; art and music; psychoanalysis; mourning and melancholia; language; the powers of horror; and the hostility aroused by a competent, gifted, and attractive woman who is at once devotedly maternal and capable of sexual passion.