Jean Giono Books In Order

Novels

  1. Second Harvest (1930)
  2. The Solitude of Compassion (1932)
  3. The Serpent of Stars (1933)
  4. The Song of the World (1937)
  5. Joy of Man’s Desiring (1940)
  6. Melville (1941)
  7. Blue Boy (1946)
  8. A King Without Diversion (1947)
  9. The Horseman On The Roof (1951)
  10. The Open Road (1951)
  11. Angelo (1958)
  12. The Straw Man (1959)
  13. The Battle of Pavia (1963)
  14. Two Riders of the Storm (1967)
  15. To the Slaughterhouse (1969)

Novellas

  1. The Man Who Planted Trees (1953)
  2. Ennemonde (2021)

Non fiction

  1. Occupation Journal (2020)

Novels Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Jean Giono Books Overview

Second Harvest

Translated by Henri Fluchre and Geoffrey Myers Illustrated by L. W. Graux A beautifully wrought fable by the author of the classic The Man Who Planted Trees. Panturle lives in the nearly deserted village of Aubignane, in the Provenal uplands. That autumn, Gaubert, the blacksmith, ‘a little man all mustache,’ had left; and before the winter was out, the well sinker’s widow had left as well. Then only Panturle remained, a man made morose almost to the point of madness by his solitude. He gave up planting and lived off what he could catch. Then out of the blue a woman arrived, someone to live for, someone to till the soil and plant new seed for. Even a village can be raised from the dead. Second Harvest is steeped in the poetry of the countryside and the seasons. Readers of The Man Who Planted Trees do not need to ask why Jean Giono remains one of the most enduring French storytellers of this century. 12 Black and White Woodcut Illustrations

The Solitude of Compassion

Giono gives us the world we live in, a world of dream, passion and reality.” Henry Miller”There is still dew on this world of Gionos; he looks out on it and records his impressions of it almost as if he were the first man seeing it.” The New York Times Book ReviewThe Solitude of Compassion, a collection of short stories never before available in English, won popular acclaim when it was originally published in France in 1932. It tells of small town life in Provence, drawing on a whole village of fictional characters, often warm and decent, at times immoral and coarse. Giono writes of a friendship forged in a battlefield trench in the midst of World War I; an old mans discovery of the song of the world; and, in the title story, the not unrelated feelings of compassion and pity. In these twenty stories, Giono reveals his marvelous storytelling through his vivid images and lyrical prose, whether he is conveying the delicate scents of lavender and pine trees or the smells of damp earth and fresh blood

The Serpent of Stars

Giono has created his own private terrestrial domain, a mythical domain…
It is a region over which the stars and planets course with throbbing pulsations. It is a land in which things happen to men as aeons ago they happened to the gods…
Henry MillerIn The Serpent of Stars, the narrator encounters a potter’s family, whose way of life is slowly revealed to us. The novel culminates in a large gathering where a Shepherd s Play a creation myth including in its cast The River, The Man, and The Mountain is enacted. This novel leaves the reader believing in the animals, the terrain of which they are part, in the people who tend to them in life.

The Song of the World

A tale of primitive love and vendetta set in the timeless French landscape of river, mountain and forest. Sailor, a woodsman, has twin sons, the elder of whom is dead and the younger, the red head, has gone missing upcountry where the powerful landowner Maudru holds sway. With his friend Antonio, the riverman, he goes in search of the boy, fearing that he too has been killed. On the way they come upon a lone girl giving birth in the woods at dead of night, and they bring her to a place of safety. Once among Maudru’s drovers, who effectively serve him as a private army, they have to watch their step, the more so when they learn that the lost twin is in fact alive but the object of a ruthless manhunt, for he has married Maudru’s daughter against her father’s wishes, and is blamed, too, for the death of a nephew. With its taut yet elegiac atmosphere The Song of the World is unmistakably the work of a master storyteller.

Joy of Man’s Desiring

‘Peasant civilization possesses as a gift human qualities which philosophical civilizations spend centuries first defining, then desiring, and finally losing.’ Jean GionoA true forebear of magical realism, French author Jean Giono created men and women rooted in the folklore of provincial France. In this beautiful new edition of the original Que Ma Joie Demeure literally, That My Joy Remain he tells the tale of a farmer couple in Haute Provence who find that the spark has somehow gone missing from their lives. One day, a stranger arrives who helps them discover how to rekindle their connection. The stranger tells them, ‘Youth is neither strength, nor a supple body, nor even youth as you conceive of it. Rather, youth is the passion for the impractical, the useless.’ The couple, with this guidance from the stranger, include friends and neighbors on their journey back to individual and collective happiness. They plant fields of flowers, a meadow of grain just for the birds, and they set their horses free. With a poet’s grace and imagination, Giono weaves a grand story of the earth and of passion, of men and women, animals and weather, of the magic we now call the ‘laws of nature.’

Blue Boy

Blue Boy by JEAN GIONO. CHAPTER I. Mof my age here remember the time when he road to Sainte Tulle was bordered by a erried row of poplars. It is a Lombard cus om to plant poplars along the wayside. This road came, with its procession of trees, from the very heart of Piedmont. It straddled Mont Genevre, it flowed along the Alps, it caine all the way with its burden of long creaking carts and its knots of curly haired countrymen who strode along with their songs and their hussar pantaloons flutter ing in the breeze. It came this far but no farther. It came with all its trees, its two wheeled carts, and its Pied monteses, as far as the little hill called Toutes Aures. Here, it looked back. From this point it saw in the hazy distance the misty peak of the Vaucluse, hot and muddy, steaming like cabbage soup. Here it was assailed by the odors of coarse vegetables, fertile land, and the plain. From here, on fine days, could be seen the still pallor of the whitewashed farmhouses and the slow

The Horseman On The Roof

Perhaps no other of his novels better reveals Giono’s perfect balance between lyricism and narrative, description and characterization, the epic and the particular, than The Horseman On The Roof. This novel, which Giono began writing in 1934 and which was published in 1951, expanded and solidified his reputation as one of Europe’s most important writers. This is a novel of adventure, a roman courtois, that tells the story of Angelo, a nobleman who has been forced to leave Italy because of a duel, and is returning to his homeland by way of Provence. But that region is in the grip of a cholera epidemic, travelers are being imprisoned behind barricades, and exposure to the disease is almost certain. Angelo’s escapades, adventures, and heroic self sacrifice in this hot, hallucinatory landscape, among corpses, criminals and rioting townspeople, share this epic tale.

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, Celine de Theus, 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.

Two Riders of the Storm

Set in the remote High Hill country of Provence, the lives of the inhabitants are molded along fiercely passionate lines. Two brothers are members of a family renowned for its brutality and strong ties. Yet this affection turns to hatred after Marceau kills a wild horse and becomes a wrestling champion. As his strength increases and his fame spreads, Ange Jason’s jealousy causes this bond to snap. The end, when it comes, is a violent and deadly confrontation. Henry Miller called Giono the French Faulkner”.

To the Slaughterhouse

Long regarded as one of France’s finest writers, Jean Giono 1895 1971 is best known for his classic best seller The Man Who Planted Trees. Conscription reaches into the hills as the First World War comes to a small Provencial community one blazing August. A committed pacifist, Giono produced one of the most affecting accounts of war ever written, with its horrifying scenes of war and descriptions of harsh, primitive conditions in the trenches. His fiercely realistic novel contrasts the wholesale destruction of men, land, and animals at the front with the moral disintegration of the lonely and anxious people left behind.

The Man Who Planted Trees

To commemorate Chelsea Green Publishing’s anniversary of the cloth bound edition of Jean Giono’s classic tale we proudly present a paperback edition with added information on how to become a WoodWise consumer. Jean Giono’s tale of Elzard Bouffier, the intrepid tree planter who single handedly reforests a barren section of southern France, is here placed in an exciting new context. In addition to creating new forests by tree planting, we can have a direct effect on their survival through our prudent use of wood products. This special edition has been prepared with the assistance of Co op America, a nonprofit organization whose WoodWise campaign protects our forest resources by raising consumer awareness of alternatives to wasteful consumption. A supplemental chapter provides information, suggestions, and tips. Readers will find the tools to locate sources for tree free paper, tackle unwanted junk mail, conserve at home and the office, and recognize environmentally sound wood products. Responsible actions such as these will contribute directly to the conservation of sustainable forests. The original, cloth bound edition of ‘The Man Who Planted Trees‘ with Michael McCurdy’s glorious woodcuts was published by Chelsea Green in 1985, and remains in print. We also offer products, including notecards, videos, and audiotapes, inspired by Giono’s story.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment