Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentions his older brother François only two times in his classic Confessions. In The Only Son, Stéphane Audeguy resurrects Rousseau's forgotten brother in a picaresque tale that brings to life the secret world of eighteenth-century Paris.
Instructed at an early age in the philosophy of libertinage by a decadent aristocrat and later apprenticed to a clock maker, François is ultimately disowned by his family and flees to Paris's underworld. There he finds work in a brothel that caters to politicians and clergy and begins his personal study of the varieties of sexual desire—to its most arcane proclivities. Audeguy uses the libertine's progress to explore the interplay between the individual and society, much in the tradition of Jean-Jacques, but with a very different emphasis. Bold, erotic, and historically fascinating, The Only Son is, in many ways, the anti-Confessions—François' own, decidedly different, portrait of human nature.

The Only Son

Literature & Fiction

Audeguy, Stéphane

Contemporary

Mariner Books

Akira Kumo miraculously survived the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. Now an eccentric couturier living in Paris, he has the world’s largest collection of literature on clouds and meteorology, which he hires Virginie Latour to catalog. As they work, he tells her the stories of those who have devoted their lives to clouds: the English Quaker who first classified clouds, the painter who became obsessed with capturing clouds on canvas, and the wealthy late-nineteenth-century amateur meteorologist Richard Abercrombie, a photographer who may have created the only definitive catalog of clouds—but only one copy exists, and it has never been seen. Kumo sends Virginie to London to track down the fabled Abercrombie Protocol, a quest both surprising and wondrous, where love, like clouds, forms and transforms lives. Sensual, hypnotic, deeply erotic, The Theory of Clouds is a novel of clouds—both historical and imaginative—and how they shape our passions, our storms, and our stories.

The Theory of Clouds

La théorie des nuages

Literary

Gallimard]

Fils unique

Genre Fiction

La littérature de A à Z (nouvelle édition): les auteurs, les oeuvres et les procédés littéraires

Lesot, Adeline

Martin, Laurence

Weil, Catherine

Eterstein, Claude

Aguettaz, François

Schréder, Ariane

Reffait, Christophe

Béguin, Michelle

Campa, Laurence

Dumeste, Marie-Hélène

Reference

HATIER

La teoría de las nubes

El Aleph Editores

La teoria delle nuvole

Fazi Editore

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