About the Author

Georges Simenon (Author)
Georges Simenon was born in Li ge, Belgium, in 1903. He is best known in Britain as the author of the Maigret novels and his prolific output of over 400 novels and short stories have made him a household name in continental Europe. He died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had lived for the latter part of his life.

Reviews

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
*Financial Times*

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
*The Times*

Terrific...the 75 Inspector Maigret books are almost uniformly wonderful. They are not crime or even detective fiction as ordinarily understood...they are about human foibles, moral failings and compromises, set in an evocatively atmospheric Paris
*Sunday Times*

A great writer of detail, of atmosphere
*Financial Times*

A genius … Simenon broke all the rules
*Daily Telegraph*

The novels brim with atmosphere, insight and intelligence . . . quite unlike anything else written before or since
*The Times*

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
*Times Literary Supplement*

I never read contemporary fiction–with one exception: the works of Simenon
*T.S. Eliot*

One of the most important writers of our century
*Gabriel García Márquez*

An astute observer of human nature, writing in a spare and vivid style
*Amor Towles*