Cover

Pascal Garnier was born in Paris in 1949. The prize-winning author of more than sixty books, he remains a leading figure in contemporary French literature, in the tradition of Georges Simenon. He died in 2010.

Emily Boyce is an editor and in-house translator at Gallic Books.

‘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

‘Horribly funny … appalling and bracing in equal measure. Masterful’

John Banville

‘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

‘Garnier’s world exists in the cracks and margins of ours; just off-key, often teetering on the surreal, yet all too plausible. His mordant literary edge makes these succinct novels stimulating and rewarding’

Sunday Times

‘Deliciously dark … painfully funny’

New York Times

‘A mixture of Albert Camus and J. G. Ballard’

Financial Times

‘A brilliant exercise in grim and gripping irony; makes you grin as well as wince’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Bleak, often funny and never predictable’

The Observer

‘A master of the surreal noir thriller – Luis Buñuel meets Georges Simenon’

Times Literary Supplement

‘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

‘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

‘Like Georges Simenon’s books, Pascal Garnier’s subversive, almost surreal tales come in slim little volumes, seldom more than 150 pages or so. But in that space he manages to say as much, and more memorably too, than many authors of books that are too heavy to hold’

Literary Review

‘Superb’

The Spectator

‘Deliciously sly and nuanced’

Irish Times

Also by Pascal Garnier:

Pascal Garnier: Gallic Noir Volumes 1, 2 and 3

The Panda Theory

How’s the Pain?

The A26

Moon in a Dead Eye

The Front Seat Passenger

The Islanders

Boxes

Too Close to the Edge

The Eskimo Solution

Low Heights

C’est la Vie

A Long Way Off

Title Page

A Long Way Off

Pascal Garnier

Translated by Emily Boyce

Gallic Books
London

Dedication

For Samuel Hall

On est loin des amours de loin
On est loin
‘Madame Rêve’
Alain Bashung and Pierre Grillet

A Long Way Off

‘I know Agen, too!’