The Krull House

'Vintage Simenon, a dark masterpiece . . . eerily prophetic' John Banville, Guardian'It's not because you're foreigners.

It's because you aren't foreign enough ... or else that you are too foreign'Just as the Krull house sits on the edge of a rural French town, the family occupies a marginal place in the life of the community around them.

Snubbed by the locals despite having lived there for decades, they rely on trade with passing sailors to earn a living.

When their relative arrives unannounced from Germany, with his unsettling, nonchalant ways, the family becomes the target of increasing suspicion and the scapegoat for a terrible crime.

Written on the eve of the Second World War, The Krull House is a taut, strangely prophetic novel about how distrust and hostility towards outsiders descends into hate-filled violence. 'Simenon lays out with ruthless exactitude the way selfish, conscience-free greed exploits modest, hospitable decency . . . The world of Chez Krull is a common, shared one' Julian Barnes, London Review of Books