Gallic Noir: Volume 1

Written over a 15-year period from the mid '90s, Garnier's short novels feature a recurring set of themes, characters and settings, and reading them side by side allows the author's profound and darkly comic tapestry of human experience to be fully appreciated. 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?

Pascal Garnier, who died in March 2010, was a talented novelist, short story writer, children's author and painter. From his home in the mountains of the Ardèche, he wrote fiction in a noir palette with a cast of characters drawn from ordinary provincial life. Though his writing is often very dark in tone, it sparkles with quirkily beautiful imagery and dry wit. Garnier's work has been likened to the great thriller writer, Georges Simenon.