The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By

The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By

Author: Georges Simenon

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2016-11-03

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0141983264

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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 the Trains Go By

The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By

Author: Georges Simenon

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2017-10-17

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1524705365

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“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.


Closely Watched Trains

Closely Watched Trains

Author: Bohumil Hrabal

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13: 9780810112780

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


Tropic Moon

Tropic Moon

Author: Georges Simenon

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 159017111X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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


Dirty Snow

Dirty Snow

Author: Georges Simenon

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2011-11-23

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1590175581

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


The Man who Watched the Trains Go by

The Man who Watched the Trains Go by

Author: Georges Simenon

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


Red Lights

Red Lights

Author: Georges Simenon

Publisher: Oldcastle Books

Published: 2002-02-02

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 9781842430866

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

It is Friday evening before Labor Day weekend. Americans are hitting the highways in droves; the radio crackles with warnings of traffic jams and crashed cars. Steve Hogan and his wife, Nancy, have a long drive ahead--from New York City to Maine, where their children are in camp. But Steve wants a drink before they go, and on the road he wants another. Soon, exploding with suppressed fury, he is heading into that dark place in himself he calls "the tunnel." When Steve stops for yet another drink, Nancy has had enough. She leaves the car. On a bender now, Steve makes a friend: Sid Halligan, an escapee from Sing Sing. Steve tells Sid all about Nancy. Most men are scared, Steve thinks, but not Sid. The next day, Steve wakes up on the side of the road. His car has a flat, his money is gone, and there's one more thing still left for him to learn about Nancy, Sid Halligan, and himself ...


Three Bedrooms in Manhattan

Three Bedrooms in Manhattan

Author: Georges Simenon

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2011-11-23

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1590175611

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


The Snow Was Dirty

The Snow Was Dirty

Author: Georges Simenon

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2018-04-17

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1524705438

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le Carré In this brilliant new translation of Georges Simenon’s classic novel, a young man descends into a brutal world of crime “And always the dirty snow, the heaps of snow that look rotten, with black patches and embedded garbage . . . unable to cover the filth.” Nineteen-year-old Frank—thug, thief, son of a brothel owner—gets by surprisingly well despite living in a city under military occupation, but a warm house and a full stomach are not enough to make him feel truly alive in such a climate of deceit and betrayal. During a bleak, unending winter, he embarks on a string of violent and sordid crimes that set him on a path from which he can never return. Georges Simenon’s matchless novel is a brutal, compelling portrayal of a world without pity; a devastating journey through a psychological no man’s land.