Description

How’s the Pain? is an off-kilter, blackly comic novel about an unlikely duo of a soon-to-be-retired assassin and a deadbeat young man, from the ‘slyly funny’ [Sunday Times] Pascal Garnier.

‘Deliciously dark … painfully funny’ New York Times

Death is Simon’s business. And now the ageing vermin exterminator is preparing to die. But he still has one last job down on the coast, and he needs a driver.

Bernard is twenty-one. He can drive and he’s never seen the sea. He can’t pass up the chance to chauffeur for Simon, whatever his mother may say. As the unlikely pair set off on their journey, Bernard soon finds that Simon’s definition of vermin is broader than he’d expected …

Veering from the hilarious to the horrific, this offbeat story from master stylist Pascal Garnier is at heart an affecting study of human frailty.

Publisher Review

Praise for Pascal Garnier 'How's the Pain? is way off kilter, blackly comic and quintessentially Gallic.' Crime Time 'Horribly funny ... appalling and bracing in equal measure' John Banville 'Wonderful ... properly noir' Ian Rankin 'Garnier plunges you into a bizarre, overheated world, seething death, writing, fictions and philosophy. He's a trippy, sleazy, sly and classy read' A. L. Kennedy 'Ennui, dislocation, alienation, estrangement - these are the colours on Garnier's palette. His books are out there on their own: short, jagged and exhilarating' Stanley Donwood 'Garnier's take on the frailty of life has a bracing originality' Sunday Times 'Deliciously dark ... painfully funny' New York Times 'Small but perfectly formed darkest noir fiction told in spare, mordant prose ... Recounted with disconcerting matter-of-factness, Garnier's work is surreal and horrific in equal measure' The Guardian 'A brilliant exercise in grim and gripping irony, it makes you grin as well as wince' Sunday Telegraph 'A mixture of Albert Camus and JG Ballard' FT 'Bleak, often funny and never predictable' The Observer 'A master of the surreal noir thriller - Luis Bunuel meets Georges Simenon' TLS 'Superb' The Spectator 'Echoes of Raymond Chandler, T.S. Eliot and the Marx Brothers' Wall Street Journal 'Brief, brisk, ruthlessly entertaining . . . Garnier makes bleakness pleasurable' NPR