The Grand Banks Café

One of the greatest writers of the 20th century … no other writer can set up a scene as sharply and with such economy as Simenon does … the conjuring of a world, a place, a time, a set of characters - above all, an atmosphere – John Banville * Financial Times *
Gem-hard soul-probes … not just the world’s bestselling detective series, but an imperishable literary legend … he exposes secrets and crimes not by forensic wizardry, but by the melded powers of therapist, philosopher and confessor – Boyd Tonkin * The Times *
Terrific…the 75 Inspector Maigret books are almost uniformly wonderful. They are not crime or even detective fiction as ordinarily understood…they are about human foibles, moral failings and compromises, set in an evocatively atmospheric Paris – David Mills * Sunday Times *
A great writer of detail, of atmosphere – Leïla Slimani * Financial Times *
A genius … Simenon broke all the rules – Jake Kerridge * Daily Telegraph *
The novels brim with atmosphere, insight and intelligence … quite unlike anything else written before or since – India Knight * The Times *
Exceptional… Simenon’s writing still seems fresh…one of the great pleasures is the summoning of France’s many landscapes and accompanying social milieux … There is also, and it’s a chief glory of the books, a whole range of different Parises, from the shiny rich to the hypocritical bourgeois middle to the struggling, furious world of the poor, desperate and professionally criminal – John Lanchester * Times Literary Supplement *
I never read contemporary fiction–with one exception: the works of Simenon – T.S. Eliot
One of the most important writers of our century – Gabriel García Márquez
An astute observer of human nature, writing in a spare and vivid style – Amor Towles

Georges Simenon

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.

David Coward

David Coward is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Leeds and has translated many books from French for Penguin Classics.

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