Maigret's Childhood Friend

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

John Banville, 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

Boyd Tonkin, 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

David Mills, Sunday Times

A great writer of detail, of atmosphere

Leïla Slimani, Financial Times

A genius … Simenon broke all the rules

Jake Kerridge, Daily Telegraph

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

India Knight, 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

John Lanchester, 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