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The Snow Was Dirty
  • Published: 1 December 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241258569
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $22.99

The Snow Was Dirty

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Dec 2016
EBook
3 Nov 2016
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A new translation of Simenon's visceral, critically acclaimed classic

And always the dirty snow, the heaps of snow that look rotten, with black patches and embedded garbage. The white powder that occasionally peels off from the crust of the sky in little clumps, like plaster from a ceiling, is unable to cover the filth.

Most people struggle to get by in a country under occupation, but Frank takes it easy in his mother's whorehouse. But Frank is restless and through the unrelenting darkness and cold of an endless winter, he will pursue abjection until at last there is nowhere to go. In The Snow was Dirty, Simenon maps a no man's land of the spirit in which human nature is driven to destruction-and redemption, perhaps, as well-by forces beyond its control.
  • Published: 1 December 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241258569
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • 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

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

Praise for The Snow Was Dirty

A brutal analysis of a wartime collaborator's moral vacuity. There's a cold, ruthless beauty to Simenon's writing.

Jay Elwes, Spectator

Feels incredibly modern... it is brutal, frank about sex and violence, and will make your flesh creep.

Ian Rankin

A masterpiece, completely brilliant . . . so nihilistic and so completely barren . . . but it is saved from being comically French by the vigour with which the story is told and the great knowingness of the author's voice.

India Knight

One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequaled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories

Guardian

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

A supreme writer . . . unforgettable vividness

Independent