'You'll get used to things, you'll see. But you have to watch very carefully what you say and what you do.'

Adil Bey is an outsider. Newly arrived as Turkish consul at a run-down Soviet port on the Black Sea, he receives only suspicion and hostility from the locals. His one intimacy is a growing, wary relationship with his Russian secretary Sonia, who he watches silently in her room opposite his apartment. But this is Stalin's world before the war, and nothing is as it seems. Georges Simenon's most starkly political work, The People Opposite is a tour de force of slow-burn tension.

'Irresistible... read him at your peril, avoid him at your loss' Sunday Times

Translated by: Siân Reynolds