It's a few days before Christmas in Versailles. Olivier has come to bury his mother, but the impending holidays and icy conditions have delayed the funeral.While trapped in limbo at his mother's flat, a chance encounter brings Olivier back in touch with childhood friend Jeanne and her blind brother, Rodolphe.Rodolphe suggests they have dinner together, along with a homeless man he's taken in. As the wine flows, dark secrets are spilled, and there's more than just hangovers ...

Ennui, dislocation, alienation, estrangement - these are the colours on Garnier's palette. And somehow, darkly, he makes them almost funny. I could compare him with JG Ballard or with Michel Houellebecq or Daniel Davies. He's been compared with Georges Simenon and Cormac McCarthy and with Patricia Highsmith. But really, his books are out there on their own, short, jagged and exhilarating, unexpected slaps around the face that make you laugh with surprise while you spin around to see who di...

Fabien and Sylvie had both known their marriage was no longer working. And yet when Sylvie is involved in a fatal car accident, her husband is stunned to discover that she had a lover who died alongside her.With thoughts of revenge on his mind, Fabien decides to find out about the lover's widow, Martine, first by stalking her, then by breaking into her home.He really needs to get Martine on her own. But she never goes anywhere without her formidable best friend, Madeleine...

Vultures at least have the decency to wait until their prey is dead before they rip it to pieces . . .At the home in the mountains he shares with his put-upon nurse, Thérèse, cantankerous retiree Édouard Lavenant is attempting to write his memoirs when a visitor calls, claiming to be his long-lost son. Jean-Baptiste's presence seems to bring about a softening of Édouard's temper, but the family reunion is soon threatened by the local vultures circling overhead . . .

Booker-winner John Banville has long heralded Pascal Garnier as 'the true heir to Simenon'. Now, with a dozen of Garnier's noirs available in English, Banville introduces a new edition of one of Garnier's masterworks as part of a collection of contemporary and classic jewels of French literature.How's the Pain? sees ageing 'pest exterminator' Simon take on one last job on the Riveira, aided by young chauffeur Bernard. As the unlikely pair set off on their journey, Bernard ...

A crime writer uses the modest advance on his latest novel to rent a house on the Normandy coast. There should be little to distract him from his work besides walks on the windswept beach, but as he begins to tell the tale of forty-something Louis - who, after dispatching his own mother, goes on to relieve others of their burdensome elderly relations - events in his own life begin to overlap with the work of his imagination.

Written over a 15-year period from the mid '90s, Garnier's short novels feature a recurring set of themes, characters and settings, and reading them side by side allows the author's profound and darkly comic tapestry of human experience to be fully appreciated.Volume 1 includes The A26, in which a new Picardy motorway brings modernity close to a flat in which a brother and sister live together, haunted by terminal illness and the events of 1945; How's ...

The future is on its way to Picardy with the construction of a huge motorway. But nearby is a house where nothing has changed since 1945. Traumatised by events that year, Yolande hasn't left her home since. And life has not been kinder to Bernard, her brother, who is now in the final months of a terminal illness.Realizing that he has so little time left, Bernard's gloom suddenly lifts. With no longer anything to lose, he becomes reckless - and murderous...

Nature's a funny old thing, it does whatever it pleases.Given the choice, Martial would not have moved to Les Conviviales. But Odette loved the idea of a brand-new retirement village in the south of France. So that was that. At first it feels like a terrible mistake: they're the only residents and it's raining non-stop. Then three neighbours arrive, the sun comes out, and life becomes far more interesting and agreeable. Until, that is, some travellers set up camp just outside their...

'A trippy, sleazy, sly and classy read' A. L. KennedyMarc dreams of going somewhere far, far away - but he'll start by taking his cat and his grown-up daughter, Anne, to an out-of-season resort on the Channel. Reluctant to go home, the curious threesome head south for Agen, whose main claim to fame is its prunes. As their impromptu road trip takes ever stranger turns, the trail of destruction - and mysterious disappearances - mounts up in their wake.Shocking, hilarious and ...

Gabriel is a stranger in a small Breton town. Nobody knows where he came from or why he's here. Yet his small acts of kindness, and exceptional cooking, quickly earn him acceptance from the locals.His new friends grow fond of Gabriel, who seems as reserved and benign as the toy panda he wins at the funfair.But unlike Gabriel, the fluffy toy is not haunted by his past....

If you have an inner life, you inevitably have a double life. It remained to be seen which of the two lives would gobble up the other.Brice and Emma had bought their new home in the countryside together. And then Emma disappeared. Now, as he awaits her return, Brice busies himself with DIY and walks around the village. He gradually comes to know his new neighbours including Blanche, an enigmatic woman in white, who has lived on her own in the big house by the graveyard since the de...