Showing results by author "Linda Coverdale - Translator" in All Categories

'I had begun, God knows why, tearing a corner off of everyday truth, begun seeing myself in another kind of mirror, and now the whole of the old, more or less comfortable truth was falling to pieces.' Confident and successful, New York advertising executive Ray Sanders takes what he wants from life. When he goes missing in a snowstorm in Connecticut one evening, his closest friend begins to reassess his loyalties, gambling with Ray's fate and his own future.

A new translation of Simenon's gripping novel about lives transformed by deceit and the destructive power of lust. It was all real: himself, the room, Andrée still lying on the ravaged bed. For Tony and Andrée, there are no rules when they meet in the blue room at the Hôtel des Voyageurs. Their adulterous affair is intoxicating, passionate - and dangerous. Soon it turns into a nightmare from which there can be no escape.

In cool, precise prose, and with an unerring sense of the absurd, the four novellas of Compulsory Happiness create a picture of everyday life in a grotesque police state, expressing terror and hope, fear and solidarity, the humorous triviality of the ordinary and the painful search for an ideal.