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BIBLIOGRAPHY

ISBN: 1842430874
EAN:
Price: £6.99
Casing: Paperback
Format: B (198 x 129mm)
Extent: 192pp
Rights: UK & Commonwealth
Pub. Date: July 2003

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Georges Simenon - born 1903 in Liege, Belgium, produced works of extraordinary psychological perception, providing compelling evocations of milieu and atmosphere, he probed the depths of lust, envy, resentment and lifelong obsession, but revealed without passing judgement. Admired by Gide, praised by people as diverse a Jean Cocteau, T. S. Eliot, Henry Miller, Somerset Maugham and John Le Carre, and with close relations with the film world, his own life was as fascinating as his works. He was reputed to have moved house 37 times in his life, and he once claimed in an interview to have made love to 10,000 women. The last 23 years he spent as a recluse, with only one companion, and wrote 21 volumes of memoirs.

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ABOUT THE BOOK

Celita is a stripper at the Monico, a nightclub in Cannes. She is also the long-standing mistress of Monsieur Leon, the owner of the Monico. She has enjoyed her struggle to win him away from his wife, Madame Florence, and she is determined that he shall be her recompense for the tragedies and injustices life has so far offered her.

Maud is a new stripper and her act of innocence makes her a star overnight and Celita at once realises that her hold over Leon is threatened.

Such is Simenon's artistry that we come to admire and sympathise with Celita in her almost schoolgirl spitefulness and jealousy towards Maud. Celita and Madame Florence even become close but nothing prepares us for the violent and startling denouement to this tragic story.