Back to The Globe
Featured Thriller
The Little Man from Archangel (Romans Durs)
In this minor-key masterpiece, a gentle bookseller seeks only obscurity until, buffeted by fate and misunderstood by his supposed friends, he makes a shocking decision.
Your reading world on The Globe
Discover your next book. Keep the ones that matter.
Join The Globe for a free reader profile and discover books, writers and stories in one place.
About the book
About The Little Man from Archangel (Romans Durs)
In this minor-key masterpiece, a gentle bookseller seeks only obscurity until, buffeted by fate and misunderstood by his supposed friends, he makes a shocking decision. Diffident, bespectacled Jonas Milk, a bookseller and stamp collector, has always lived unobtrusively. His Russian Jewish family of origin was deracinated, or worse, during the world wars. But Jonas found peace, and a kind of belonging, in his small French town. At age thirty-eight, he even converted to Catholicism and married a high-spirited younger woman, Gina. If Gina is unfaithful, who is Jonas to object? And, one summer, when she fails to come home for days―well, that’s nothing new. Except this time, almost accidentally, he lies about her whereabouts to his neighbors. Suddenly, he falls under suspicion. It is shattering: for all his best efforts to fit in, he’s evidently seen as an outsider, a foreigner. Even, perhaps, a murderer. With The Little Man from Archangel, a rueful masterpiece wrought with a miniaturist’s precision, Georges Simenon scales the peak of his gifts as a storyteller of rare complexity and acuity.
Reader conversation
Discuss this book
Are you the author or publisher?
Claim this page to verify the book information, add an author profile, update purchase links or request removal.