Why? For being the ONLY CLAMS library to have a novel on the shelf by the new winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature ... Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio! I’m sure many libraries will be ordering what is available in English soon, but it is wonderful to know one library was already ready with at least one novel.  Here is how Booklist described the novel at the time:

“*STARRED REVIEW*/ Le Clézio, one of France’s finest writers (The Mexican Dream ), is an incantatory and dazzlingly visual novelist. This hypnotic and mythic novel begins on Mauritius in 1892. Young Alexis, enamored of the glory of the pristine island, is devastated when a hurricane destroys his home and, ultimately, leads to his father’s death. He inherits only one legacy: his father’s obsession with a buried treasure on a distant island called Rodrigues. Armed with an old cryptic map and a dreamer’s determination, Alexis sets out to unearth this treasure and rescue his mother and sister from poverty. Once on Rodrigues, however, Alexis loses track of time and succumbs to the pure, lulling splendor of the place and the magic presence of a lithe, coppery, harpoon-wielding woman named Ouma. But his idyll is obliterated when the world goes to war in 1914. Le Cl{}ezio brilliantly conveys the sublime and terrible beauty of life and its twin, death, in devastating evocations of the pulse of the sea, the blaze of the sun, the horrors of violence, and the miraculous lyricism of the mind. A remarkable work.”