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.

Octave Mirbeau, author of the classic satires 'The Torture Garden' and 'Diary of a Chambermaid' (the latter made into films by both Jean Renoir and Luis Bunuel), wrote this scathing novel on the cusp of the twentieth century. Driven mad by modern life, Georges Vasseur heads off for a rest cure. At a spa town, though, he encounters precisely those things he has been trying to escape: corrupt politicians, amnesiac coquettes, cheerfully sadistic killers, imperialist generals, and quack psychiatrists. Hypocrites are eternal, and not much has changed since Mirbeau wrote this acid portrait of his era."