Book description
'His first instinct was to stretch out his hands to the sky. The white
clouds seemed so near to him, surely they were easy to hold and to
caress, strange-moving things belonging to the wide blue space of heaven
. . . ' Julius Levy grows up in a peasant family in a village on the
banks of the Seine. A quick-witted urchin caught up in the
Franco-Prussian War, he is soon forced by tragedy to escape to Algeria.
Once there, he learns the ease of swindling, the rewards of love affairs
and the value of secrecy. Before he's twenty, he is in London, where his
empire-building begins in earnest, and he becomes a rich and very
ruthless man. Throughout his life, Julius is driven by a hunger for
power, his one weakness his daughter, Gabriel . . . A chilling story of
ambition, Daphne du Maurier's third novel has lost none of its ability
to unsettle and disturb. Daphne du Maurier (1907-89) was born in
London, educated at home and in Paris, and lived for much of her life in
her beloved Cornwall, the setting for many of her novels. Most of her
novels have been bestsellers and many have been made into films. She is
considered one of the most accomplished novelists of the twentieth
century.
