CHOSEN BY ROSE TREMAIN AS HER ORANGE INHERITANCE - Vintage Classics has partnered with The Orange Prize for Fiction to ask six recipients of the Prize which book they would pass onto the next generation.

Honore de Balzac was born 20 May 1799, the second son of a civil servant. He was brought up away from his family home, first in the care of a wet-nurse and then at a strict grammar school at Vendome. Balzac then studied at the Sorbonne, before entering training to become a lawyer, like his father. At the age of twenty, to the consternation of his family, he announced his intention to abandon law and become a writer. His early literary works met with little success, and Balzac's various business ventures as a printer and publisher also foundered. In 1829, he began to conceive a grand design for a series of novels comprehensively portraying French society in the eighteenth century. Balzac's Comedie humaine became his life's work, comprising 91 separate works depicting private and public life in the town and country, in politics and the military. Masterpieces of the Comedie humaine include Eugenie Grandet, Pere Goirot, The Wild Ass's Skin and The Black Sheep. Many of his novels were critically acclaimed on publication, and went on to profoundly influence authors from Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert to Charles Dickens and Henry James. At the age of fifty-one, Balzac was finally able to marry the recently widowed Evelina Hanska, whom he had loved for eighteen years. But by this time he was in very poor health and Balzac died only five months after his wedding, on 18 August 1850. Rose Tremain's most recent book, The Road Home, won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction in 2008. Her novels have been published in 27 countries and have won many prizes, including the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Restoration was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was made into a film (1995) and a stage play (2009). The Colour and Music & Silence, are currently in development as films, and the bestselling The Road Home is being adapted for television. Rose Tremain lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer, Richard Holmes.