The Venice Train (Romans Durs)
About this ebook
On a night train from Venice to Paris, Justin Calmar, a middle-aged husband and father, agrees to help a stranger with an urgent errand. Retrieving a suitcase from a station locker and delivering it to a nearby address, he finds the murdered body of a young woman and unwittingly becomes entangled in her death. Inside the suitcase is a small fortune, he discovers, and as he attempts to resume his life in Paris, this sudden windfall nags at his psyche. As police investigations mount and his paranoia deepens, Calmar is forced to confront how restrained his life has been, and how little freedom he truly has.
The Venice Train is both a taut psychological thriller and a pitiless study of male fantasy. With characteristic economy and precision, Georges Simenon strips away his characters’ illusions, laying bare how easily an act of kindness can turn into complicity—and how quickly an ordinary life can unravel.
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About the author
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.
Ros Schwartz has translated numerous works of fiction and nonfiction from French, including a new translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and Mireille Gansel’s Translation as Transhumance. The recipient of a number of awards, she was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009 and received the Institute of Translation and Interpreting’s John Sykes Memorial Prize for Excellence in 2017.
