The New Investigations of Inspector Maigret

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 *
A superior stylist … photographic … Simenon’s subject is how people who are pushed to the edge push themselves over it; the force of the sleuthing is that of psychoanalysis, not police interrogation. – Adam Gopnik * New Yorker *
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 *
Strangely comforting … so many lovely bistros from the Paris of mid-20th C. The corpses are incidental, it’s the food that counts – Margaret Atwood
Simenon’s supreme virtue as a novelist, to burrow beneath the surface of his characters’ behaviour; to empathise … it is this unfailing humanity that makes the Maigret books truly worth reading – Graeme Macrae Burnet * Guardian *
A gem of a read. It’s like discovering a buried treasure trove of words, characters and dialogue which both entertain and make you think – Jane Corry * author of We All Have Our Secrets *

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.

Howard Curtis

Howard Curtis has translated more than a hundred books, mostly fiction, from French, Italian and Spanish for publishers in the UK and the USA, including over twenty novels in the Penguin Simenon series. He has won several major awards and has also taught translation.

Ros Schwartz

Ros Schwartz is an award-winning translator from French. Acclaimed for her new version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, published in 2010, she has over 100 fiction and non-fiction titles to her name. The French government made Ros a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009, and in 2017 she was awarded the Institute of Translation and Interpreting’s John Sykes Memorial Prize for Excellence.

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