Romain Gary

This novel follows a young man's passion through the ravages of WWII. Ludo lives with his uncle, kite maker Ambrose Fleury, in the small town of Clery in the French countryside. Ludo, like everyone in the Fleury family, has an impressive "historical memory" that earns him the ire of his teachers and arguments with Lila, the mercurial, naive daughter of Polish aristocrats and the object of his affection, isn't as keen as Ludo to rehash the country's...

"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...