Description

One act of childhood defiance becomes a lifelong experiment in freedom.

From the age of twelve, Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo makes his home among ash, elm, magnolia, plum and almond, living high in the trees.
He walks along paths made from twisted olive branches, makes his bed in a holly oak, bathes in a fountain constructed from poplar bark and keeps an aerial library of the books with which he educates himself in philosophy and mathematics.
Suspended among the leaves, Cosimo encounters bandits and pirates, conducts a passionate love affair and watches the Age of Enlightenment, the French Revolution and Napoleon pass beneath him.
The Baron in the Trees is a classic literary fable about independence, imagination and political idealism. Playful, philosophical and wonderfully inventive, Italo Calvino’s novel turns one boy’s act of defiance into a lifelong experiment in freedom.

‘I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends’ Salman Rushdie
‘The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists’ The Times

Publisher Review

Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before.This is highly unnerving: fortunately you're usually too busy laughing to go mad... I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends -- Salman Rushdie Breathtakingly inventive -- David Mitchell The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists * The Times * Calvino is a wizard * New York Review of Books *