Vintage Simenon, a dark masterpiece . . . A calmly, almost diffidently narrated yet terrifying study of race hatred and mass hysteria, it was eerily prophetic
Guardian
Simenon lays out with ruthless exactitude the way selfish, conscience-free greed exploits modest, hospitable decency . . . The world of <i>Chez Krull</i> is a common, shared one . . . the world of the immigrant, of navigating cautiously in a foreign country
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.
The Independent
Seriously good
Evening Standard
'Vintage Simenon, a dark masterpiece . . . eerily prophetic' John Banville, Guardian
'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.
'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' Julian Barnes, London Review of Books