The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By

Author: Georges Simenon
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141983264
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
A brilliant new translation of one of Simenon's best loved masterpieces. 'A certain furtive, almost shameful emotion ... disturbed him whenever he saw a train go by, a night train especially, its blinds drawn down on the mystery of its passengers' Kees Popinga is a respectable Dutch citizen and family man. Then he discovers that his boss has bankrupted the shipping firm he works for - and something snaps. Kees used to watch the trains go by to exciting destinations. Now, on some dark impulse, he boards one at random, and begins a new life of recklessness and violence. This chilling portrayal of a man who breaks from society and goes on the run asks who we are, and what we are capable of. 'Classic Simenon ... extraordinary in its evocative power' Independent 'What emerges is the bare human animal' John Gray 'Read him at your peril, avoid him at your loss' Sunday Times

The Man who Watched Trains Go by

Author: Georges Simenon
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590171493
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
Publisher description

Closely Watched Trains

Author: Bohumil Hrabal
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810112780
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 116

Book Description
Hrabal's postwar classic about a young man's coming of age in German-occupied Czechoslovakia is among his most beloved and accessible works. Closely Watched Trains is the subtle and poetic portrait of Milos Hrma, a timid young railroad apprentice who insulates himself with fantasy against a reality filled with cruelty and grief. Day after day as he watches trains fly by, he torments himself with the suspicion that he himself is being watched and with fears of impotency. Hrma finally affirms his manhood and, with a sense of peace and purpose he has never known before, heroically confronts a trainload of Nazis.

The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By

Author: Georges Simenon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524705365
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le Carré In this Georges Simenon classic, a Dutch clerk flees to Paris with his crooked boss’s money and meets the woman behind the man “A certain furtive, almost shameful emotion . . . disturbed him whenever he saw a train go by, a night train especially, its blinds drawn down on the mystery of its passengers.” Kees Popinga is a respectable Dutch citizen and family man—until the day he discovers his boss has bankrupted the shipping firm he works for, and something snaps. Kees used to watch the trains go by on their way to exciting destinations. Now, on some dark impulse, he boards one at random, and begins a new life of recklessness and violence. The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By is a chilling portrayal of a man who breaks from society and goes on the run asks who we are, and what we are capable of.

Dirty Snow

Author: Georges Simenon
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590175581
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
Nineteen-year-old Frank Friedmaier lives in a country under occupation. Most people struggle to get by; Frank takes it easy in his mother’s whorehouse, which caters to members of the occupying forces. But Frank is restless. He is a pimp, a thug, a petty thief, and, as Dirty Snow opens, he has just killed his first man. Through the unrelenting darkness and cold of an endless winter, Frank will pursue abjection until at last there is nowhere to go. Hans Koning has described Dirty Snow as “one of the very few novels to come out of German-occupied France that gets it exactly right.” In a study of the criminal mind that is comparable to Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, 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.

Red Lights

Author: Georges Simenon
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590171936
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
Publisher description

Three Bedrooms in Manhattan

Author: Georges Simenon
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590175611
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
An actor, recently divorced, at loose ends in New York; a woman, no less lonely, perhaps even more desperate than the man: they meet by chance in an all-night diner and are drawn to each other on the spot. Roaming the city streets, hitting its late-night dives, dropping another coin into yet another jukebox, these two lost souls struggle to understand what it is that has brought them, almost in spite of themselves, together. They are driven—from moment to moment, from bedroom to bedroom—to improvise the most unexpected of love stories, a tale of suspense where risk alone offers salvation. Georges Simenon was the most popular and prolific of the twentieth century’s great novelists. Three Bedrooms in Manhattan—closely based on the story of his own meeting with his second wife—is his most passionate and revealing work.

Tropic Moon

Author: Georges Simenon
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 159017111X
Category : Adultery
Languages : en
Pages : 155

Book Description
A young Frenchman, Joseph Timar, travels to Gabon carrying a letter of introduction from an influential uncle.

Train Man

Author: Andrew Mulligan
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1473562333
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
'Brilliant... profoundly affecting. A beautiful story' - RUTH JONES, author of Never Greener ****** Michael is a broken man. He's waiting for the 09.46 to Gloucester, so as to reach Crewe for 11.22: the platforms are long at Crewe and he can walk easily into the path of a high-speed train to London. He's planned it all: a net of tangerines (for when the refreshments trolley is cancelled), and a juice carton, full of whisky. He longs to silence the voices in his head: ex-partners, colleagues, and the unbearable memories of work and school. What Michael hasn't factored in, however, is a twelve-minute delay. He's going to miss his connection - and make a few new ones... ****** 'An absorbing novel...set in the comic wonderland of the English rail network' Daily Mail 'Carefully crafted and with an undertow of melancholy, Train Man is reminiscent of Nick Hornby's high-concept scenarios' Guardian 'Mulligan's prose...delivers a strong human story with impressive skill' Mail on Sunday

The Man who Watched the Trains Go by

Author: Georges Simenon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
Hardworking Dutch family man Kees Popinga loses his money when the shipping firm he works for collapses. Something snaps and from the shell of a modern citizen emerges a calculating paranoiac, capable of random acts of violence - even murder.