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Biographical note
Georges Simenon was born in Liège, Belgium in 1903. An intrepid traveller with a profound interest in people, Simenon strove on and off the page to understand, rather than to judge, the human condition in all its shades. His novels include the Inspector Maigret series and a richly varied body of wider work united by its evocative power, its economy of means, and its penetrating psychological insight. He is among the most widely read writers in the global canon. He died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had lived for the latter part of his life.A brutal analysis of a wartime collaborator's moral vacuity. There's a cold, ruthless beauty to Simenon's writing.
Spectator
Feels incredibly modern... it is brutal, frank about sex and violence, and will make your flesh creep.
- Ian Rankin,
A masterpiece, completely brilliant . . . so nihilistic and so completely barren . . . but it is saved from being comically French by the vigour with which the story is told and the great knowingness of the author's voice.
- India Knight,
One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequaled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories
Guardian
Fierce, bleak and compellingly written . . . with pitiless landscapes of hopeless longing, random cruelty and galloping fate warmed only by the twilit lyricism of doomed desire. These are novels of eye-opening, spine-tingling control and intensity.
- Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
A supreme writer . . . unforgettable vividness
Independent
'Feels incredibly modern... it is brutal, frank about sex and violence, and will make your flesh creep' Ian Rankin
A brilliant new translation of Simenon's critically acclaimed masterpiece.
'And always the dirty snow, the heaps of snow that look rotten, with black patches and embedded garbage ... unable to cover the filth.'
Nineteen-year-old Frank - thug, thief, son of a brothel owner - gets by surprisingly well despite living in a city under military occupation, but a warm house and a full stomach are not enough to make him feel truly alive in such a climate of deceit and betrayal. During a bleak, unending winter, he embarks on a string of violent and sordid crimes that set him on a path from which he can never return. Georges Simenon's matchless novel is a brutal, compelling portrayal of a world without pity; a devastating journey through a psychological no-man's land.
'Among the best novels of the twentieth century' New Yorker
'An astonishing work' John Banville
'So noir it makes Raymond Chandler look beige' Independent