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  • Published: 1 February 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241487099
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $22.99

The Strangers in the House





A new translation of a twisting detective novel from the celebrated author of the Maigret series

Hector Loursat, a lawyer in the small town of Moulins, has lived as a drunken recluse since his wife left him eighteen years previously. Unmoored from society and estranged from his daughter, he shuts himself away, numbed by endless bottles of burgundy. But when a dead man is found in his house one night, the resulting police investigation unearths secrets that shake the town - and Loursat's isolation - to the core. No longer able to ignore the world, he emerges to take on the murder case himself and confront the lives of Moulins' by-ways and back streets.

In the progressive break-down of Loursat's self-imposed isolation, Simenon brilliantly depicts the psychology of loneliness and a man's tortured re-engagement with humanity and its darkest acts.

  • Published: 1 February 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241487099
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $22.99

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Praise for The Strangers in the House

Quite simply a masterpiece

John Banville

More philosophically profound than any of the fiction of Camus or Sartre, and far less self-conscious. This is existentialism with a backbone of tempered steel

New Republic
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