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The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By (Romans Durs)

By Georges Simenon & Siân Reynolds
The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By (Romans Durs) by Georges Simenon & Siân Reynolds digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

A private confession leads an ordinary Dutchman to abandon his family for a life on the run in Georges Simenon’s existentialist masterpiece.

Kees Popinga has always played by society’s rules. A dutiful husband and father, he owns a house in a nice neighborhood and holds down a responsible job in the shipping industry. Fantasies of escape, of rebellion, are kept carefully contained—until the night Kees’s boss makes a private confession. Having recklessly bankrupted the firm, he plans to fake his own death.

Kees is not only shocked; he’s exhilarated. Abandoning his home and family, he is soon a violent fugitive, wanted by police in Amsterdam and Paris. Has he gone insane, or was his compliant former self a masquerade? Infused with Georges Simenon’s gift for moral complexity, The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By is a haunting existentialist masterpiece.

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About Georges Simenon

Georges Simenon (1903–1989) was born in Liège, Belgium. An intrepid traveler with a profound interest in people, Simenon strove on and off the page to understand—and not to judge—the human condition in all its shades. His books include the Inspector Maigret series and a richly varied body of wider work united by its evocative power, its economy of means, and its penetrating psychological insight. He is among the most widely read writers in the global canon.

Siân Reynolds

Siân Reynolds was born and educated in Cardiff, read modern languages at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, and has a doctorate in history from the University of Paris-VII, supervised by Michelle Perrot. She has taught in secondary schools, adult education, and the Universities of Sussex and Edinburgh, and was a professor of French at the University of Stirling from 1990 to 2004. Reynolds has published books on both French and Scottish history, and has translated works by leading French historians such as Fernand Braudel as well as detective novels by Fred Vargas. She is a past president of the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France, and is currently a trustee of the Scottish Working People’s History Trust.

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