Le Grand Troupeau

Jean Giono, the author of the famous ecological parable The Man Who Planted Trees, also produced one of the most affecting accounts of war ever written. To the Slaughterhouse is one of his finest novels. Conscription reaches into the hills as the First World War comes to a small Provencal community one blazing August. Giono's fiercely realistic novel contrasts the wholesale destruction of men, land and animals at the front with the moral disintegration of the lonely and anxious people left behind. Yet not all is despair. The novel ends with a message of hope based on one of Giono's most common themes: rebirth.