Though his tallest tales were those he passed off as the truth, he was as popular as he was prolific, producing more than 30 volumes of prize-winning essays, plays, memoir and fiction, including La Vie devant soi, the bestselling French novel of the 20th Century. But his star faded as he aged and was further dimmed by posthumous revelations that he’d duped the Parisian literary establishment, publishing some of his most rapturously received works (La Vie among them) under a fake name.

High flyer

In the past decade, his reputation has shown signs of renewed vigour. First came a portrait by heavyweight biographer David Bellos, then a translation of a previously untranslated novel, Hocus Bogus (Pseudo in the French original). Now, his final novel, The Kites (Les Cerfs-volants), has been translated into English for the first time and published as a Penguin Modern Classic.

Lauded as one of the 20th Century’s most acclaimed works of French fiction, The Kites was written shortly before Gary’s suicide, and tells the story of two young lovers – one an orphan raised by his uncle, a gentle French kite-maker, the other a Polish aristocrat – separated by the chaos and carnage of World War Two. Epic and empathetic, it’s rich in Gary’s signature themes and preoccupations, such as idealism, the loss of innocence, and the ways in which less than heroic choices can still be moral choices.