Reading Garnier’s short novels side by side allows his profound and darkly comic tapestry of human experience to be fully appreciated. Volume 1 includes The A26, in which a new Picardy motorway brings modernity close to a flat in which a brother and sister live together, haunted by terminal illness and the events of 1945; How’s the Pain?, the tale of an ageing ‘pest exterminator’ taking on one last job on the French Riviera; and The Panda Theory, in which a stranger, Gabriel, arrives in a Breton town and befriends the locals … but is he as angelic as he seems? AUTHOR: 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 Ardeche, 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.