A Maigret Christmas

The novels brim with atmosphere, insight and intelligence . . . quite unlike anything else written before or since

India Knight, The Times

One of the greatest writers of the 20th century . . . no other writer can set up a scene as sharply and with such economy as Simenon does . . . the conjuring of a world, a place, a time, a set of characters - above all, an atmosphere

John Banville, Financial Times

The father of contemporary European detective fiction . . . I loved the exotic setting of Parisian bars and run-down hotels, the economic storytelling

Ann Cleeves, Guardian

Strangely comforting…so many lovely bistros from the Paris of the mid 20th C. The corpses are incidental, it’s the food that counts

Margaret Atwood

A great writer of detail, of atmosphere. His descriptions of Paris influenced me

Leïla Slimani, Financial Times

To inhabit the vividly realised world of Parisian streets, dives, bistros and high-class hotels . . . it is this unfailing humanity that makes the Maigret books truly worth reading

Graeme Macrae Burnet, Guardian

Exceptional… Simenon’s writing still seems fresh…one of the great pleasures is the summoning of France’s many landscapes and accompanying social milieux . . . There is also, and it’s a chief glory of the books, a whole range of different Parises, from the shiny rich to the hypocritical bourgeois middle to the struggling, furious world of the poor, desperate and professionally criminal

John Lanchester, Times Literary Supplement