The Flood

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J.M.G. Le Clézio was born on 13 April 1940 in Nice and was educated at the University College of Nice and at Bristol and London universities. His knowledge of English enabled him to work closely with his translator on his debut novel, The Interrogation, which won the Prix Renaudot in 1963. Since then he has written over forty highly acclaimed books and has been translated into thirty-six languages. The Interrogation is published by Penguin and three of his early novels are now Penguin Modern Classics: The Flood, Terra Amata and Fever. Le Clézio divides his time between France (Nice, Paris and Brittany), New Mexico and Mauritius. In 2008 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

François Besson listens to a tape recording of a girl contemplating suicide. Drifting through the days in a provincial city, he thoughtlessly starts a fire in his apartment, attends confession, and examines, with great intentness but without affection, a naked woman he wakes beside. And, as Besson moves through an ugly and threatening rain, his thoughts eventually lead to violence, first turned outward and then directed languidly against himself.

Terra Amata

For Chancelade, the world is teeming with beauty, wonder and possibilities. From a small boy playing on the beach, through his adolescence and his first love, to the death of his father and on to the end of his own life, he relishes the most minute details of his physical surroundings - whether a grain of sand, an insect or a blade of grass - as he journeys on a sensory adventure from cradle to grave. Filled with cosmic ruminations, lyrical description and virtuoso games of language and the imagination, Terra Amata brilliantly explores humankind's place in the universe, the relationship between us and the Earth we inhabit and, ultimately, how to live.

Fever

In these nine unforgettable and impressionistic 'tales of little madness', the Nobel Prize-winning author Le Clézio explores how the physical sensations we experience every day can be as strong as feelings of love or hate, with their power to bring chaos to our lives. In 'The Day that Beaumont became Acquainted with his Pain', a man with toothache spends the night seeking ways to disown his throbbing jaw; in 'Fever', Roch finds his mind transported by sunstroke; while in 'A Day of Old Age' little Joseph tries to comprehend the physical suffering of a dying old woman. Set in a timeless, spaceless universe, these experimental and haunting works portray the landscape of the human consciousness with dazzling verbal dexterity and power.

J.M.G. Le Clézio

Adam Pollo, an amnesiac ex-student, has broken into an empty seaside villa. He visits the town at rare intervals and as briefly as his scanty purchases - cigarettes, biscuits, beer - permit. Soon lack of human contact affects him like a drug and he experiences other modes of being: through a dog's eye or a rat's . . . states of heightened consciousness which build up into a terrifying world of glaring hallucinatory experience. 
 
Then Adam addresses a small crowd in the town. His unnerving rhetoric ends in arrest and removal to an asylum. And there the interrogation begins . . . 
 
With this stunning debut novel Le Clézio was acclaimed as the most exciting figure to appear on the French literary scene since the death of Camus. The Interrogation still holds the power to grip and astonish today.

The Interrogation

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