The Krull House

byGeorges Simenon, Howard Curtis (Translator)
It's not because you're foreigners. It's because you aren't foreign enough ... or else that you are too foreign

Just as the Krull house sits on the edge of a rural French town, the family occupies a marginal place in the life of the community around them. Snubbed by the locals despite having lived there for decades, they rely on trade with passing sailors to earn a living. When their relative arrives unannounced from Germany, with his unsettling, nonchalant ways, the family becomes the target of increasing suspicion and the scapegoat for a terrible crime.

Written on the eve of the Second World War, The Krull House is a taut, strangely prophetic novel about how distrust and hostility towards outsiders descends into hate-filled violence.

'Irresistible...read him at your peril, avoid him at your loss' Sunday Times

Vintage Simenon, a dark masterpiece . . . A calmly, almost diffidently narrated yet terrifying study of race hatred and mass hysteria, it was eerily prophetic

John Banville, Guardian

About 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.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9780141986777
  • Length: 208 pages
  • Price: £6.99
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