Friday - Softcover

A fascinating, unusual novel... a remarkably heady French wine in the old English bottle... Tournier has attempted nothing less than an exploration of the soul of modern man. * New York Times Book Review * Like [Crusoe's island], Tournier's novel is unique, self-sufficient, imaginative, well worth exploring, and with a number of minor miracles to reveal. * Time * M. Tournier is a cultivated and disciplined writer, and his Robinson, the son of a Yorkshire draper, is most likable... [T]he castaway has that quaint and peculiarly English stolidity that seems to exist only in the imagination of the French. * New Yorker * Defoe's book is distinguished by an unawareness of the psychology of solitude; nothing happens. Michel Tournier, however, has placed his man in precisely the same situation of static impotence, and then proceeds to illustrate a personal development as passionate and variegated as anyone could wish. * New Statesman *

Friday, winner of the 1967 Grand Prix du Roman of the Academie Francaise, is a sly, enchanting retelling of the legend of Robinson Crusoe by the man the New Yorker calls "France's best and probably best-known writer." Cast away on a tropical island, Michel Tournier's god-fearing Crusoe sets out to tame it, to remake it in the image of the civilization he has left behind. Alone and against incredible odds, he almost succeeds. Then a mulatto named Friday appears and teaches Robinson that there are, after all, better things in life than civilization.