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  • Published: 1 July 2021
  • ISBN: 9780141995519
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160

Betty




A searing exploration of a woman's hidden destructive impulses from one of the great writers of the twentieth century

'There was no longer that ambivalent inconsistency between her words and thoughts, no more fever, no more artificial heat, no more vagueness. Instead was the truth in all its rawness, in black and white, in stark, cruel lines.'

Adrift and alone, Betty finds herself propped up at the bar of a sleazy establishment on the Champs-Élysées. When an older woman takes her under her wing, Betty's tortured past returns to haunt her: excluded by her high-society peers and overwrought with jealousy, she struggles with a desperate compulsion to tear her picture-perfect life apart.

Originally published in 1961, this gripping psychological thriller caused a sensation and inspired a film adaptation by Claude Chabrol.

'A brilliant portrait of betrayal, hypocrisy, love and loss' - Chicago Tribune

  • Published: 1 July 2021
  • ISBN: 9780141995519
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160

About the author

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.

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