Gallic Noir: The A26, How’s the Pain?, The Panda Theory

‘One of the most remarkable and, in the English-speaking world at least, one of the most inexplicably underappreciated French writers of the twentieth century’ John Banville, New York Review of Books

Enter the world of Pascal Garnier, where life’s misfits take centre stage, there is drama in the everyday and the unexpected is always just around the corner.

Volume 1 includes The A26, in which a new Picardy motorway brings modernity close to a flat in which a brother and sister live together, haunted by terminal illness and the events of 1945; How’s the Pain?, the tale of an ageing ‘pest exterminator’ taking on one last job on the French Riviera; and The Panda Theory, in which a stranger, Gabriel, arrives in a Breton town and befriends the locals … but is he as angelic as he seems?

Dark, funny and shot through with menace, these perfectly crafted novellas of Gallic noir are also affecting studies in human alienation.