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The Krull House
  • Published: 1 December 2020
  • ISBN: 9780241453414
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $22.99

The Krull House

Formats & editions
EBook
7 June 2018
Paperback
1 Dec 2020
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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: 1 December 2020
  • ISBN: 9780241453414
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $22.99
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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.

GS

Also by Georges Simenon

The Cat
Stan the Killer
The Widow Couderc
The Hatter's Ghosts
The New Investigations of Inspector Maigret
The Venice Train
The People Opposite
See all

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