"Pascal, a landowner fallen on hard times and trapped in a miserable marriage, runs away from home and wins a lot of money at the gaming tables in Monte Carlo. Meanwhile a body has been found in the millrace of his village and it is assumed that Pascal has killed himself. Seizing what looks like a chance to create a new life, he travels to Rome under an assumed name and struggles to invent a different identity which he can inhabit. He fails, returns home, finds his wife has remarried and has to act out the role of being as it were a living ghost. All these tragic events are recounted with verve and wit and comes across clearly in Simborowski's spirited translation from the Italian."Robert Nye in The Guardian

Sebastien Roch is a brilliantly drawn portrait of a boy's psychological, sexual and political coming of age in provincial France against the background of the Belle Epoque. We follow Sebastien as he enters a jesuit college as a natural, unspoiled innocent child and develops into a corrupt, disillusioned, tortured adolescent until his senseless death at the age of 21 on the battlefield.

It is a powerful finale to Mirbeau's trilogy of "angry young man" novels. The harrowing story of the perversion of innocence is offset by Mirbeau's lyrical descriptions, capturing in words the serene impressionism of Monet and the violent pornographic excesses of Feliciens Rops.

Part two of Octave Mirbeau's autobiographical trilogy, ABBE JULES tells of a priest's lifelong struggle with his passions. With the realism of Zola and the decadent vision of D'Aurevilly, and reflecting the impressionism of Monet, Pissaro and Van Gogh, Mirbeau's novel presents us with a small boy's vision of provincial France, where family, education and religion conspire to produce a petit bourgeois tortured by repressed desire, violent fantasies, and forbidden lusts.