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  • Published: 15 January 2010
  • ISBN: 9781846553622
  • Imprint: Harvill Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $30.00

Angelo



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.

  • Published: 15 January 2010
  • ISBN: 9781846553622
  • Imprint: Harvill Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $30.00

About the author

Jean Giono

Jean Giono was born in 1895 in Manosque, Provence, and lived there most of his life. He supported his family working as a bank clerk for eighteen years before his first two novels were published, thanks to the generosity of André Gide, to critical acclaim. He went on to write thirty novels, including The Horseman on the Roof, and numerous essays and stories. In 1953, the year in which he wrote The Man who Planted Trees, he was awarded the Prix Monégasque for his collective work. Jean Giono died in October 1970.

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Praise for Angelo

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

JEAN D’ORMESSON

Each page of Giono may be read as a poem.

BERTRAND POIROT-DELPECH, Le Monde

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.

DAVID HUGHES, Mail on Sunday