The Kites

The Kites is indeed a treasure, capable of accessing an enormous node of insight and almost-overwhelming beauty spliced with bittersweet candor... we are lucky to have it at last. We're going to need it.

The Kites is indeed a treasure, capable of accessing an enormous node of insight and almost-overwhelming beauty spliced with bittersweet candor... we are lucky to have it at last. We're going to need it.

This final work by a maverick genius of modern French fiction tells a story of love and war that's both charming and moving. It's a perfect introduction to the unique imagination of Romain Gary

Romain Gary has created a gallery of heroes who are willing to die for liberty but have to settle for the lesser victory of self-knowledge

A major literary star ... whose life was stranger than fiction

A rebel French writer ... a brilliant storyteller, a master craftsman and one of France's most original writers

What talent, most certainly, how many ideas and passions too. You seize us and shake us. Ah!

What a gold mine!

A truly beautiful novel

Gary is brilliant at capturing the existential emotion for which the title of "The Kites" is an obvious metaphor -- sky-bound yet tethered by that string.

More than a humorist, more than a storyteller, he's a moralist , an independent and significant student of the struggle to tell right from wrong, good conduct from bad. This struggle took place within a life that was, as people like to say, itself as good a story as any novel that he wrote

Romain Gary was one of the most important French writers of the 20th century. He won the once-in-a-lifetime honour the Prix Goncourt twice, the only person ever to have done so, by writing under a secret nom de plume . He was married to the American actress Jean Seberg and served in the RAF during WW2. He died in Paris in 1980 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, shortly after completing this haunting last work.