Czeslaw Milosz is an outstanding Polish poet and intellectual, a Nobel Prize winner (1980). «Issa Valley» is the best of his novels. It was written in Polish, but first published in France (as Mi?osz’s books were banned in Poland). This novel is about good and evil, sin and grace, predestination and freedom, about the lost paradise of childhood spent on the banks of a fictitious river, about «the search of reality purified by the time flowing away».