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The Paradisiacs
Last Kingdom IV
Series: The French List
Brief Description
Pascal Quignard delves into the uncanny bond between recognition and loss, outlining how our earliest experiences shape our longing for a paradise we can never reclaim. What if paradise was not a place we lost, but one we never truly knew? In The Paradisiacs, the fourth...
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Format: Hardback
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Description
Pascal Quignard delves into the uncanny bond between recognition and loss, outlining how our earliest experiences shape our longing for a paradise we can never reclaim.
What if paradise was not a place we lost, but one we never truly knew? In The Paradisiacs, the fourth volume of the Last Kingdom series, Pascal Quignard meditates on the nature of paradiseโnot as an Eden to which we might return, but as a place of origin that lingers in myth.
Through his signature blend of ancient texts, Paleolithic art, psychoanalysis, and personal reflection, Quignard explores our primal longing for recognition. He traces this yearning back to the erstwhile, a prenatal paradise from which we are expelled at birth, and examines how resemblance and recognition shape our identities.
At once poetic and philosophical, The Paradisiacs invites readers into Quignard's singular world, where language and history coalesce into a profound rumination on the origins of selfhood. With John Taylor's masterly translation, this latest installment of Last Kingdom is a hypnotic and revelatory reading experience for those drawn to the intersections of philosophy and the ineffable.
Series: The French List
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Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781803095554
Publisher: Seagull Books London Ltd
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 05 January 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Seagull Books London Ltd
Contributors:
- Translated by John Taylor
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 127.0mm
Height: 203.0mm
Weight: 454g
Pages: 202
About the Author
Pascal Quignard is the author of over sixty titles and is widely regarded as one of the foremost literary French writers today. In 2002, he won Franceโs most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt for The Roving Shadows. John Taylor has translated many key French, Swiss, Italian, and modern Greek writers. His translations include books by Philippe Jaccottet, Georges Perros, Catherine Colomb, and Pierre Chappuis, as well as Pascal Quignardโs The Unsaddled and Dying of Thinking. Taylor is also the author of several books of poetry and poetic prose, including, most recently, What Comes from the Night.
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