Romain Gary Book order

Now back in print, this most famous and heartbreaking novel by Romain Gary inspired two movies, including the Netflix feature The Life Ahead

"The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary follows Morel, a Frenchman who survives the Holocaust - a survival he credits to imagining elephants roaming the wilderness. Once free, he travels to French Equatorial Africa with the aim of saving his beloved elephants from being hunted and killed for meat and ivory. Realizing his more conventional tactics are not eliciting a response, however, he turns militant, and the story takes a dark turn. This novel examines the corrosive force of human desensitization, and it is one of the first classic ecological novels of our time." -- Provided by publisher

"Promise at Dawn begins as the story of a mother's sacrifice: alone and poor, she fights fiercely to give her son the very best. Romain Gary chronicles his childhood in Russia, Poland, and on the French Riveria; he recounts his adventurous life as a young man fighting for France in World War II. But above all he tells the story of the love for his mother that was his very life, their secret and private planet, their wonderland born out of a mother's murmur into a child's ear, a promise whispered at dawn of future triumphs and greatness, of justice and love“--Provided by publisher.

A New York Times Notable Book 2018 'A rebel French writer ... a brilliant storyteller, a master craftsman and one of France's most original writers' Independent 'The Kites is a novel touched from beginning to end with grace, a great saga about the innate dignity of love that succeeds in the feat of being funny and poetic, tender and sharp, committed and fierce, with a touch of brilliance in the art of dialogue' Muriel Barbery, author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog A quiet village in Normandy, 1932. Ludo is ten years old and lives with his uncle, a kindly, eccentric creator of elaborate kites. One day, sitting in a strawberry field, Ludo meets the beautiful young Polish aristocrat Lila. And so begins Ludo's lifelong adventure of love and longing for Lila, who only begins to return his feelings just as Europe descends into the devastation of World War 2. After Poland and France fall, Lila and Ludo are separated. Ludo's friends in the village must find their own ways of resisting: the local restaurateur who is dedicated above all to France's haute cuisine, a Jewish brothel madam who sleeps with her unwitting enemies and Ludo, who cycles past the Nazis every day, passing on messages for the French Resistance - thinking always of Lila.