The People Opposite: Georges Simenon

`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.