"For Giono, literature and reality overlap the way that waves sweep over the shore, one ceaselessly refreshing the other and, in certain wondrous moments, giving it a glassy clearness." --Ryu Spaeth, The New Republic

"Giono's writing possesses a vigor, a surprising texture, a contagious joy, a sureness of touch and design, an arresting originality, and that sort of unfeigned strangeness that always goes along with sincerity when it escapes from the ruts of convention." --André Gide, unpublished letter, 1929

An existential detective story by one of France's most popular modern writers, set in a mid-nineteenth century mountain village, available in English for the first time?The book started off entirely by chance, without even a character. The character was the Tree, the Beech, and the starting point?that was the discovery of a crime: a dead body turns up in the branches of this tree. There was the Tree; there was the victim; an inanimate thing, a corpse. Well, the corpse requires a murderer, that's clear, and the murder requires investigation. What I wrote was a novel about the investigator. That?s what I wanted to write, but it had to start with a tree that had nothing to do with the story at all.?Such was Jean Giono?s account of how A King Alone came to be. The title alludes to Pascal?s saying ?A king without distraction is a man full of wretchedness,? and the book is set in a remote Alpine village in the mid-nineteenth century. At its center is the enigmatic officer Langlois. In deepest winter, the inhabitants of a remote Alpine village mysteriously begin to disappear. Langlois comes from afar to protect the village and investigate the crime. Giono?s novel about a tiny community at the dangerous edge of things and a man of law who is ever more a man alone could be described as a metaphysical Western. It unfolds with the uncanny inevitability and disturbing intensity of a dream.