Promise at Dawn

'You will be a great hero, a general, Gabriele d'Annunzio, Ambassador of France!' For his whole life, Romain Gary's fierce, eccentric motherhad only one aim: to make her son a great man. And she did. This, his thrilling, wildly romantic autobiography, is the story of his journey from poverty in Eastern Europe to the sensual world of the Côte d'Azur and on to wartime pilot, resistance hero, diplomat, filmmaker, star and one of the most famed French writers of his age.

"I grew up in the certitude that one day I should help give back the earth to those who ennoble it with their courage and warm it with their love." Promise at Dawn begins as the story of a mother’s sacrifice: alone and poor, she fiercely battles to give her son the very best. Romain Gary chronicles his childhood in Russia, Poland, and on the French Riviera and recounts his adventurous life as a young man fighting for France in World War II. But above all he tells the story of the love for his mother that was his life—their secret and private planet, their wonderland “born out of a mother’s murmur into a child’s ear, a promise whispered at dawn of future triumphs and greatness, of justice and love.”