The water of the hills

Two novels, published in the same year (1962), and both set in the hills of Provence in France, Jean de Florette tells the story of two grasping and unprincipled farmers who plot to trick a naïve newcomer out of his land. Manon des Sources, which takes up the story some ten years later, is the story of the man’s daughter who finds a way of exacting revenge on the village for the inadvertent death of her father.