The Widow

Praise

“These books…are not mysteries…They are hard, blunt, frequently punishing studies of human beings driven by circumstance and personality to the ends of their tethers, forcing them to extreme measures…They are acute, compact, remarkably varied, and as lapidary as great pop songs.” —Luc Sante, Bookforum

"As the New York Review of Books Classics series publishes Simenon after Simenon at a rate the novelist would envy, it's tempting to read them all in a lump, as an extensive, though still partial, psychological portrait of the writer." -The Nation

“Georges Simeon is not only a master of suspense, he knows also how to probe so deeply into the minds of his characters as to reveal with remarkable fidelity the more evasive of human motives.” –Cleveland Press

“Marked by a brutal and earthy realism…Extremely readable.” –Eerie Times

“Strong, terrible, splendid stuff her, by one of the world’s strangest, most notable talents.” –Houston Chronicle

“Simenon’s novels of suspense…unfold with a relentlessness, a sense of compulsion, that is as chilling as the deeds to which his people are driven by the quirks of character within them…One of the greatest and most prolific of the modern French creators of fiction, the author is notable for the clean economy of his writing style.” –Philadelphia Inquirer

"If I hadn't read Ticket of Leave (The Widow), I couldn't have written The Stranger." –Albert Camus.

“[A] psychological masterpiece” –St. Petersburg Times

“[Further] examples of M. Simenon’s ability to grasp entirely dissimilar milieux and to demonstrate the universality of the tragedy to be founding both of them...There is a harsh, almost Biblical intensity to M. Simenon’s catalogues of punishment: he is a believer in original sin.” –The New York Times