Editions Gallic / How's the Pain?

Pascal Garnier, who died in March 2010, was a talented novelist, short story writer, children's author and painter. From his home in the mountains of the Ardèche, he wrote fiction in a noir palette with a cast of characters drawn from ordinary provincial life. Though his writing is often very dark in tone, it sparkles with quirkily beautiful imagery and dry wit. Garnier's work has been likened to the great thriller writer, Georges Simenon.

Emily Boyce is a translator and editor. She was shortlisted for the French Book Office New Talent in Translation Award in 2008, the French-American Translation Prize in 2016, and the Scott Moncrieff Prize in 2021. She lives in London.

Praise for Pascal Garnier

'At once extremely violent, irresistibly funny, and inexplicably moving, in the subtle way that only genuine art can manage to be' John Banville, New York Review of Books

'Garnier's take on the frailty of life has a bracing originality' Sunday Times

'Small but perfectly formed darkest noir fiction told in spare, mordant prose ... Recounted with disconcerting matter-of-factness, Garnier's work is surreal and horrific in equal measure' The Guardian

'Wonderful ... properly noir' Ian Rankin

'Garnier plunges you into a bizarre, overheated world, seething death, writing, fictions and philosophy. He's a trippy, sleazy, sly and classy read' A. L. Kennedy

'Combines a sense of the surreal with a ruthless wit' The Observer

'Tense, strange, disconcerting and slyly funny' Sunday Times

'A brilliant exercise in grim and gripping irony, it makes you grin as well as wince' Sunday Telegraph

'A mixture of Albert Camus and JG Ballard' FT

'Bleak, often funny and never predictable' The Observer

'A master of the surreal noir thriller - Luis Buñuel meets Georges Simenon' TLS

'A jeu d'esprit of hard-boiled symbolism, with echoes of Raymond Chandler, T.S. Eliot and the Marx Brothers' Wall Street Journal

'Brief, brisk, ruthlessly entertaining . . . Garnier makes bleakness pleasurable' NPR

'Ennui, dislocation, alienation, estrangement - these are the colours on Garnier's palette. His books are out there on their own: short, jagged and exhilarating' Stanley Donwood