Pagnol's tragedy explores themes of sacrifice, selfishness and revenge in a Provencal village.

Tells the story of Jean de Florette, a 35-year-old, city-bred, hunchbacked idealist, his wife, Aimee, and his daughter, Manon. In the second novel, Manon seeks revenge for her father's death, and it is she who brings the wheel full circle in a final dramatic retribution in the town square.

Title on the spine and cover reads: Jean de Florette & Manon of the springs.

With warmth, lucidity and good humour, Pagnol, a boy from the city, recounts the glorious summer days he spent exploring the sun-baked Provençal countryside. He vividly captures the atmosphere of a childhood filled with the simple pleasures: a meal, a joke, an outing shared with his close-knit and loving family. These heart-warming stories remind us of how children can invest the smallest event or statement with incredible significance, how mysterious the workings of the adult world can seem to them and how painful the learning process can often prove. However, Pagnol’s writing is filled with enormous optimism and delight. And his triumph in these classic memoirs is to have created that rare thing, a work suffused with joy. ‘Pagnol’s place in the history of French culture is secure. The Prousts and Sartres may be admired, but Pagnol is loved’ Times Literary Supplement

Colourless, tasteless, odourless, ageless: water is both the simplest thing on earth and the most complex. We cannot live without it yet it kills six thousand children a day. It is the ultimate renewable resource but we pollute it without thinking twice. Why, if water is so valuable does nobody want to pay for it unless it comes in a designer bottle? Is it really the oil of the twenty-first century? Will we all soon be fighting over it, or can it lead countries into co-operation rather than conflict? In this enthralling voyage of discovery, Rupert Wright sets out to discover exactly what water is and why it plays such an important role in history, culture, art and literature. Part reportage and part personal journey, Take Me to the Source is the fascinating story of the substance that makes life on earth possible.

The subject of murder has always held a particular fascination for us. But, since at least the nineteenth century, we have seen the murderer as different from the ordinary citizen—a special individual, like an artist or a genius, who exists apart from the moral majority, a sovereign self who obeys only the destructive urge, sometimes even commanding cult followings. In contemporary culture, we continue to believe that there is something different and exceptional about killers, but is the murderer such a distinctive type? Are they degenerate beasts or supermen as they have been depicted on the page and the screen? Or are murderers something else entirely? In The Subject of Murder, Lisa Downing explores the ways in which the figure of the murderer has been made to signify a specific kind of social subject in Western modernity. Drawing on the work of Foucault in her studies of the lives and crimes of killers in Europe and the United States, Downing interrogates the meanings of media and texts produced about and by murderers. Upending the usual treatment of murderers as isolated figures or exceptional individuals, Downing argues that they are ordinary people, reflections of our society at the intersections of gender, agency, desire, and violence.

Brill's Companion to the Reception of Euripides provides a comprehensive account of the influence and appropriation of all extant Euripidean plays since their inception: from antiquity to modernity, across cultures and civilizations, from multiple perspectives and within a broad range of human experience and cultural trends, namely literature, intellectual history, visual arts, music, opera and dance, stage and cinematography. A concerted work by an international team of specialists in the field, the volume is addressed to a wide and multidisciplinary readership of classical reception studies, from experts to non-experts. Contributors engage in a vividly and lively interactive dialogue with the Ancient and the Modern which, while illuminating aspects of ancient drama and highlighting their ever-lasting relevance, offers a thoughtful and layered guide of the human condition.

Get the lowdown on the best fiction ever written. Over 230 of the world’s greatest novels are covered, from Quixote (1614) to Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (2002), with fascinating information about their plots and their authors – and suggestions for what to read next. The guide comes complete with recommendations of the best editions and translations for every genre from the most enticing crime and punishment to love, sex, heroes and anti-heroes, not to mention all the classics of comedy and satire, horror and mystery and many other literary genres. With feature boxes on experimental novels, female novelists, short reviews of interesting film and TV adaptations, and information on how the novel began, this guide will point you to all the classic literature you’ll ever need.

In the quiet cul-de-sac where Keith and Stephen live the only immediate signs of the Second World War are the blackout at night and a single random bombsite. But the two boys start to suspect that all is not what it seems when one day Keith announces a disconcerting discovery: the Germans have infiltrated his own family. And when the secret underground world they have dreamed up emerges from the shadows they find themselves engulfed in mysteries far deeper and more painful than they had bargained for. 'Bernard Shaw couldn't do it, Henry James couldn't do it, but the ingenious English author Michael Frayn does do it: write novels and plays with equal success ... Frayn's novel excels.' John updike, New Yorker 'A beautifully accomplished, richly nostalgic novel about supposed second-world-war espionage seen through the eyes of a young boy.' Sunday Times 'Deeply satisfying . . . Frayn has written nothing better.' Independent