Description

‘Shifting from psychological thriller to absurd road trip tinged with black humor, A Long Way Off is the odyssey of an anti-hero’ France-Amerique

‘Rich and abundant in dark comedy’ Strong Words Magazine

‘Masterly’ John Banville

‘Wonderful . . . properly noir’ Ian Rankin

Marc dreams of going somewhere far, far away – but he’ll start by taking his cat and his grown-up daughter, Anne, to an out-of-season resort on the Channel.

Reluctant to go home, the curious threesome head south for Agen, whose main claim to fame is its prunes. As their impromptu road trip takes ever stranger turns, the trail of destruction – and mysterious disappearances – mounts up in their wake.

Shocking, hilarious and poignant, the final dose of French noir from Pascal Garnier, published shortly before his death, is the author on top form.

Publisher Review

'Deliciously dark ... painfully funny' Marilyn Stasio, New York Times 'Brief, brisk, ruthlessly entertaining ... Garnier makes bleakness pleasurable' John Powers, NPR 'Wonderful ... properly noir' Ian Rankin 'Horribly funny ... appalling and bracing in equal measure' John Banville '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 'Worthy of J. G. Ballard. 4 stars' The Independent 'Combines a sense of the surreal with a ruthless wit' The Observer 'Reminiscent of Joe Orton and the more impish films of Alfred Hitchcock and Claude Chabrol' Sunday Times 'Tense, strange, disconcerting and slyly funny' Sunday Times 'A mixture of Albert Camus and J. G. Ballard' Financial Times 'Bleak, often funny and never predictable' The Observer 'A master of the surreal noir thriller - Luis Bunuel meets Georges Simenon' Times Literary Supplement 'A jeu d'esprit of hard-boiled symbolism, with echoes of Raymond Chandler, T.S. Eliot and the Marx Brothers' Wall Street Journal 'A perfectly balanced cross between a thriller and a social document' L'Express 'A guaranteed grisly thriller' ShortList 'Arch and lyrical ... a funny and outlandish story' Crime Thriller Fella 'Garnier's main theme - the banality of a bourgeois existence - is a common one, although never, in my experience, has it been dealt with so succinctly ... a clever piece of literary noir' Killing Time Crime 'Combining the style of Simenon with the visual imagination and humour of the Coen Brothers, there is much to recommend these novellas. They are small works of literary genius, and I would urge you to discover them for yourselves' Raven Crime Reads 'If you appreciate Georges Simenon's romans durs, i.e. his harder, edgier novels, Garnier is your boy ... He routinely tosses off penetrating philosophical truths like they're afterthoughts, as the French do so well. There's dark humor in these short novels, lots of apparently arbitrary brutality that's all the more chilling due to its seeming randomness, colourful characters, and some lines and passages that hit such a deep place, you just have to put the book down and reflect for a while after reading them' Criminal Element