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.

Presents an account and indictment of colonialism.

Francois 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.

Adam Pollo, an amnesiac ex-student, has broken into an empty seaside villa. He visits the town at rare intervals. 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.

Explores how the physical sensations we experience can be as strong as feelings of love or hate, with their power to bring chaos to our lives. This title features tales such as The Day that Beaumont became Acquainted with his Pain , Fever , and A Day of Old Age . It portrays the landscape of the human consciousness.

War - in the mind of the fragile Bea B, in the infinite icy landscape she journeys through, in Vietnam, in 10,000 years of human history. The war of the title is not merely a war of arms but a generalised state of violence permeating every atom of Le Clezio's creation. Bea B searches for clues for the origin of the evil.

Upon an immense stretch of flat ground at the mouth of a river bathed in sunlight rises Hyperpolis. It stands there, surrounded by its four asphalt car-parks, to condemn us - a huge enveloping supermarket. Each of us will see ourselves reflected in the characters who move mindlessly about Hyperpolis.

Features a journey that begins in the dazzling streets of a nameless necropolis, and leads across fleeting landscapes - deserts, seas, mountains, islands, cities and great plains - to countless entertainments and adventures in four continents.

Young Nour is a North African desert tribesman. It is 1909, and as the First World War looms Nour's tribe - the Blue Men - are forced from their lands by French colonial invaders. Spurred on by thirst, hunger, suffering, they seek guidance from a great spiritual leader. The holy man sends them even further from home, on an epic journey northward.

Set largely in locations along the French Riviera, these 11 short stories depict with great compassion the harsh realities of life for the less-privileged inhabitants of this privileged region.

Set largely in locations along the French Riviera, these 11 short stories depict with great compassion the harsh realities of life for the less-privileged inhabitants of this privileged region.