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  • Published: 15 June 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241534724
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $22.99

The People Opposite




An extraordinary tale of betrayal from the celebrated author of the Maigret series

On the shore of the Black Sea, on the edge of the Soviet Union, a little city has a new Turkish consul. Adil Bey - alone in an alien land - has taken the job after the mysterious death of his predecessor. Receiving only suspicion and hostility, he soon becomes reliant on his secretary, Sonia, for any taste of intimacy. They begin a quiet love affair, and from his window at the consulate, he watches her and her family go about their lives in the room across the way.

But this is Stalin's world before the war, and nothing is as it seems. . .

Georges Simenon's most starkly political work, The People Opposite is a tour de force of slow-burn tension and existentialist meditation.

  • Published: 15 June 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241534724
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $22.99

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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Praise for The People Opposite

A unique teller of tales ... What interested Simenon was the average man losing control of his own fate

Observer
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