Author:Honoré de Balzac,Donald Adamson
His elegantly-crafted tale of sibling rivalry, Honoré de Balzac's The Black Sheep is translated from the French with an introduction by Donald Adamson in Penguin Classics.
Philippe and Joseph Bridau are two extremely different brothers. The elder, Philippe, is a superficially heroic soldier and adored by their mother Agathe. He is nonetheless a bitter figure, secretly gambling away her savings after a brief but glorious career as Napoleon's aide-de-camp at the battle of Montereau. His younger brother Joseph, meanwhile, is fundamentally virtuous - but their mother is blinded to his kindness by her disapproval of his life as an artist. Foolish and prejudiced, Agathe lives on unaware that she is being cynically manipulated by her own favourite child - but will she ever discover which of her sons is truly the black sheep of the family? A dazzling depiction of the power of money and the cruelty of life in nineteenth-century France, The Black Sheep compellingly explores is a compelling exploration of the nature of deceit.
Donald Adamson's translation captures the radical modernity of Balzac's style, while his introduction places The Black Sheep in its context as one of the great novels of Balzac's renowned Comédie humaine.
Honoré De Balzac (1799-1850) failed at being a lawyer, publisher, printer, businessman, critic and politician before, at the age of thirty, turning his hand to writing. His life's work, La Comédie humaine, is a series of ninety novels and short stories which offer a magnificent panorama of nineteenth-century life after the French Revolution. Balzac was an influence on innumerable writers who followed him, including Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.
If you enjoyed The Black Sheep, you might like Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, also available in Penguin Classics.
Green paints an unforgettable portrait of a doomed, amoral world whose characters, trapped in the fog, are somehow waltzing blithely towards oblivion...cinematic in its intensity
—— Robert McCrum , GuardianHeartbreaking, funny and written with such luminous prose - he's the most brilliant, and neglected, of English writers
—— Red MagazinePerhaps the best introduction to another great original of the English novel, who learned from Firbank’s economy, but who had his own quite different imaginative world. Loving, set among the servants of an Irish country house, combines his superbly truthful ear for how people really speak with an unforgettable vein of surreal poetry
—— Alan Hollinghurst , New York TimesThe most original, the best writer of his time
—— Rebecca WestThe most gifted prose writer of his generation
—— V. S. PritchettGreen's books remain as solid and glittering as gems- They are not, like so many contemporary novels, mere slices of life but highly successful attempts at making art give meaning to life
—— Anthony BurgessAbout Henry Green, however, there’s an irreducible, longstanding excitement among the few who have read him... With Green, we’re presented with a singular kind of artist who, like the poets of ancient India and Greece, has nothing to offer us but delight. We don’t know what to do with such a writer
—— Amit Chaudhuri , GuardianPraise for Lisa Jewell
—— -Addictively readable
—— The TimesA joy . . . a fun summer read
—— GuardianThe best romantic comedy we've read in ages
—— CompanyTackles serious issues with humour - proving that chick-lit can be intelligent, interesting and huge fun
—— Sunday ExpressA triumph
—— HelloTop marks. Fantastic
—— HeatLovely
—— Daily TelegraphMoving and intelligent
—— IndependentMagnetic, unpretentious and bursting with one-liners
—— CosmopolitanFans of chick-lit will understand when I say that this is a book you simply disappear into
—— Sunday Telegraph
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