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Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

Biography

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo is one of France’s most exciting and ambitious young writers. He is the author of PORNOGRAPHIA, LE SEL and UNE EDUCATION LIBERTINE, which won the Goncourt First Novel Prize. ANIMALIA, his fourth novel, is his first to appear in English.

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

Books by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

written by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, translated by Frank Wynne - Fiction

The small village of Puy-Larroque, southwest France, 1898. Éléonore is a child living with her father, a pig farmer whose terminal illness leaves him unable to work, and her God-fearing mother, who runs both farm and family with an iron hand. When World War I breaks out and the village empties, Éléonore gets a taste of the changes that will transform her world as the 20th century rolls on. In the second part of the novel, which takes place in the 1980s, the untamed world of Puy-Larroque seems gone forever. Now, Éléonore has herself aged into the role of matriarch, and the family is running a large industrial pig farm, where thousands of pigs churn daily through cycles of birth, growth and death.