The Mahé Circle (Romans Durs)

A shattering study of restlessness and midlife crisis on the ocean, from an icon of bleak fiction.

François Mahé took his family on vacation to Porquerolles, a sun-drenched Côte d’Azur island, only because a friend suggested it. His everyday life as a small-town doctor was sedate and predictable, but contented—until he experienced the strange, hostile energy of Porquerolles, with its intense heat and deafening thrum of cicadas. Now François is consumed with a terrible restlessness, a mutinous longing that settles on an impoverished young girl. He doesn’t love her, he tells himself, or even desire her. Yet for what she represents—danger, newness, a renunciation of passivity—he may just set a match to everything. A pitiless meditation on the irreconcilable lures of belonging and freedom, The Mahé Circle is Georges Simenon at the height of his disturbing powers.