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  • Published: 7 June 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141986777
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 208

The Krull House




A taut, prophetic novel about how distrust and hostility towards outsiders can descend into hate-filled violence

It's not because you're foreigners. It's because you aren't foreign enough ... or else that you are too foreign

Just as the Krull house sits on the edge of a rural French town, the family occupies a marginal place in the life of the community around them. Snubbed by the locals despite having lived there for decades, they rely on trade with passing sailors to earn a living. When their relative arrives unannounced from Germany, with his unsettling, nonchalant ways, the family becomes the target of increasing suspicion and the scapegoat for a terrible crime.

Written on the eve of the Second World War, The Krull House is a taut, strangely prophetic novel about how distrust and hostility towards outsiders descends into hate-filled violence.

'Irresistible...read him at your peril, avoid him at your loss' Sunday Times

  • Published: 7 June 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141986777
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 208

About the author

Georges Simenon

Georges Simenon was born in Liège, 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.

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Praise for The Krull House

Vintage Simenon, a dark masterpiece . . . A calmly, almost diffidently narrated yet terrifying study of race hatred and mass hysteria, it was eerily prophetic

John Banville, Guardian

Simenon lays out with ruthless exactitude the way selfish, conscience-free greed exploits modest, hospitable decency . . . The world of Chez Krull is a common, shared one . . . the world of the immigrant, of navigating cautiously in a foreign country

Julian Barnes, London Review of Books

Fierce, bleak and compellingly written . . . with pitiless landscapes of hopeless longing, random cruelty and galloping fate warmed only by the twilit lyricism of doomed desire. These are novels of eye-opening, spine-tingling control and intensity.

Boyd Tonkin, The Independent