Michel had been a blindfold scholar until, newly married, he contracted tuberculosis. His will to recover brings self-discovery and the growing desire to rebel against his background of culture, decency and morality. But the freedom from constraints that Michel finds on his restless travels is won at great cost.

Set in a small village, an old man looks back on a chequered life with secret regrets, concealing a truth he will not reveal until the end. This title tells a story about young women forced into marriages with old men, about mothers and daughters, stepmothers and stepdaughters, youthful passions, and the regrets of old age.

Serge Valene wants to create an elaborate painting of the building he has made his home for the last sixty years. As he plans his picture, he contemplates the lives of all the people he has ever known there.

The Flowers of Evil, which T. S. Eliot called the greatest example of modern poetry in any language, shocked the literary world of nineteenth century France with its outspoken portrayal of lesbian love, its linking sexuality and death, its unremitting irony, and its unflinching celebration of the seamy side of urban life. The volume was seized by the police, and Baudelaire and his published were .

In Search of Lost Time is one of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language. This book is an English translation of the French original.

Set in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a dingy haberdasher's shop in the passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, this novel tells how the heroine and her lover, Laurent, kill her husband, Camille, but are subsequently haunted by visions of the dead man and prevented from enjoying the fruits of their crime.

A memoir of the author's time among the desperately poor and destitute in London and Paris. It documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses, working as a dishwasher in the vile 'Hotel X', living alongside tramps, surviving on scraps and cigarette butts.

Isabel Walker, a young, not-so-innocent, American abroad, arrives in Paris to find that her sister's French husband ('the frog prince') has just walked out. While Isabel embarks on her own sentimental education, her sister's marriage disintegrates into bitter Franco-American wrangles over money, titles and a mysterious painting.

Miller's groundbreaking first novel, banned in Britain for almost thirty years, now reinvigorated in a new Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition.

In the vineyards, wine caves, and cellars of France as war and occupation came to the country winemakers acted heroically not only to save the best wines but to defend their way of life. This title presents the true stories of vignerons who sheltered Jewish refugees in their cellars and of winemakers who risked their lives to aid the resistance.

In French mountains, more and more sheep are being found with their throats torn out. The evidence points to a wolf of unnatural size and strength. However Suzanne thinks it is a werewolf. Then she is found slaughtered in the same manner. Her friend Camille attempts to find out who is responsible and Commissaire Adamsberg is called in for help.

Enchanting memoir of a struggling writer living and working in the eccentric Parisian bookshop, 'Shakespeare and Company'

Revisionist biography of one of the great women of the 16th century, not the incarnation of evil, as portrayed by Dumas, but a heroine who held her adopted country together in times of Catholic/Protestant strife and preserved the monarchy.

Algeria 1954-1962.

A story about dirt - and about sun, water, work, elation, and defeat. And about the sublime pleasure of having a little piece of French land all to oneself to till. Most of all, it's about the slow-growing friendship between an outsider and a close-knit community of French farmers.

The chronicles of Froissart are one of the greatest contemporary records of 14th-century England and France. Depicting the great age of Anglo-French rivalry from the deposition of Edwards II to the downfall of Richard II, Froissart portrays the deeds of knights in battle at Sluys, Crecy, Calais and Poitiers during the Hundred Years War.

In 1926, de Saint-Exupery began flying for the airline Latecoere - later known as Aeropostale - opening up the first mail routes across the Sahara and the Andes. This autobiographical narrative combines encounters with nomadic Arabs and other adventures. It includes the story of his crash in the Libyan Desert in 1936, and his miraculous survival.

One of the earliest and most famous novels in Balzac's great Comedie Humaine, 'Eugenie Grandet' (1833) is a story of family conflict, unrequited love and self-sacrifice set against the aftermath of the French Revolution.

When an epidemic threatens to wipe out the silk trade in France, Herve Joncour (a young silkworm breeder) has to travel overland to distant Japan, to smuggle out healthy silkworms. In the course of his secret negotiations with the local baron, Joncour's attention is arrested by the man's concubine, a girl who does not have oriental eyes.

The diary of Jean-Dominique Bauby who, with his left eyelid (the only surviving muscle after a massive stroke) dictated a remarkable book about his experiences locked inside his body. A masterpiece and a bestseller in France, it is now a major motion picture directed by Julian Schnabel.