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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 in these collected volumes allows the author's profound and darkly comic tapestry of human experience to be fully appreciated.
About the author
Pascal Garnier, who died in March 2010, was a talented novelist, short story writer, children’s author and painter. From his home in the mountains of the Ardèche, he wrote fiction in a noir palette with a cast of characters drawn from ordinary provincial life. Though his writing is often very dark in tone, it sparkles with quirkily beautiful imagery and dry wit. Garnier’s work has been likened to the great thriller writer, Georges Simenon.
Melanie Florence teaches at the University of Oxford and translates from the French.
Emily Boyce is a translator and editor. She was shortlisted for the French Book Office New Talent in Translation Award in 2008, the French-American Translation Prize in 2016, and the Scott Moncrieff Prize in 2021. She lives in London.
Jane Aitken is a publisher and translator from the French.
Summary
Pascal Garnier's `deliciously dark and painfully funny' noirs, now collected in three volumes.
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Praise for Pascal Garnier
‘A dark, richly odd and disconcerting world … devastating and brilliant’ Sunday Times
‘A mixture of Albert Camus and JG Ballard’ Financial Times
‘A brilliant exercise in grim and gripping irony, it makes you grin as well as wince’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Garnier’s take on the frailty of life has a bracing originality’ Sunday Times
‘Marvellously unpredictable’ The Guardian
‘A master of the surreal noir thriller – Luis Buñuel meets Georges Simenon’ TLS
‘Bleak, often funny and never predictable’ Observer
'For those with a taste for Georges Simenon or Patricia Highsmith' The Independent
'Deliciously dark … painfully funny' Marilyn Stasio, New York Times
‘Pascal Garnier is my favourite French crime writer by a country mile ...’ Laura Wilson, The Guardian
‘Horribly funny … appalling and bracing in equal measure. Masterful’ John Banville
‘Garnier plunges you into a bizarre, overheated world, seething death, writing, fictions and philosophy. He’s a trippy, sleazy, sly and classy read’ A. L. Kennedy
‘Wonderful ... Properly noir’ Ian Rankin
'Ennui, dislocation, alienation, estrangement – these are the colours on Garnier’s palette. 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 did it' Stanley Donwood
‘Exquisite noir’ Publishers Weekly
‘Brief, brisk, ruthlessly entertaining ... Garnier makes bleakness pleasurable’ John Powers, NPR
‘Wickedly fun ... wonderfully dark’ Complete Review
‘A perfectly balanced cross between a thriller and a social document’ L’Express
