Used book – Chronicles, I: A King Alone, Jean Giono

"The book began completely by chance, without any characters. The character was the Tree, the Beech. The starting point, suddenly, was the discovery of a crime, a corpse found in the branches of this tree. First there was the Tree, then the victim; we started with an inanimate being, followed by a corpse; the corpse simply brought forth the murderer, and then the murderer brought forth the avenger. It was the novel of the avenger that I wrote. That was the one I wanted to write, but starting from a tree that had no business being in the story." Jean Giono.