Little Man from Archangel (Romans Durs)

In this minor-key masterpiece, a gentle bookseller seeks only obscurity until, buffeted by fate and misunderstood by his supposed friends, he makes a shocking decision.

Diffident, bespectacled Jonas Milk, a bookseller and stamp collector, has always lived unobtrusively. His Russian Jewish family of origin was deracinated, or worse, during the world wars. But Jonas found peace, and a kind of belonging, in his small French town. At age thirty-eight, he even converted to Catholicism and married a high-spirited younger woman, Gina.

If Gina is unfaithful, who is Jonas to object? And, one summer, when she fails to come home for days-well, that's nothing new. Except this time, almost accidentally, he lies about her whereabouts to his neighbors. Suddenly, he falls under suspicion. It is shattering: for all his best efforts to fit in, he's evidently seen as an outsider, a foreigner. Even, perhaps, a murderer. With The Little Man from Archangel, a rueful masterpiece wrought with a miniaturist's precision, Georges Simenon scales the peak of his gifts as a storyteller of rare complexity and acuity.