A Maigret Christmas

The novels brim with atmosphere, insight and intelligence … quite unlike anything else written before or since – India Knight * The Times *
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 *
The father of contemporary European detective fiction … I loved the exotic setting of Parisian bars and run-down hotels, the economic storytelling – Ann Cleeves * Guardian *
Strangely comforting…so many lovely bistros from the Paris of the mid 20th C. The corpses are incidental, it’s the food that counts – Margaret Atwood
A great writer of detail, of atmosphere. His descriptions of Paris influenced me – Leïla Slimani * Financial Times *
To inhabit the vividly realised world of Parisian streets, dives, bistros and high-class hotels … it is this unfailing humanity that makes the Maigret books truly worth reading – Graeme Macrae Burnet * Guardian *
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 *

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

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