Description

‘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

Publisher Review

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 *