Hourmaster

First US edition. Small 8vo. Pp. [xii], 108, [8 (blank)]. Quarter-bound beige cloth over maroon paper-covered boards; maroon endpapers. Jacket design by Sylvia Frezzolini Severance.

Originally published as Le Maître des heures by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle in 1997.

Author third's novel. A 1998 New York Times Notable Book. A morality fable set in seventeenth century France, tracing the unlikely friendship between a dissolute Duke and the keeper of his many clocks.

At the tender age of 21, Bataille won the 1993 Prix du Premier Roman for his debut novel Annam. "A French novelist's fable without a moral, in which 218 clocks drown out the hiss of nothingness in an isolated seaside castle." –New York Times Book Review