num_pages: 560
description: Pedigree is Georges Simenons longest most unlikely and most adventurous novel the book that is increasingly seen to lie at the heart of his outsize achievement as a chronicler of modern self and society. In the early 1940s Simenon began work on a memoir of his Belgian childhood. He showed the initial pages to Andr Gide who urged him to turn them into a novel. The result was Simenon later quipped a book in which everything is true but nothing is accurate. Spanning the years from the beginning of the century with its political instability and terrorist threats to the end of the First World War in 1918 Pedigree is an epic of everyday existence in all its messy unfinished intensity and density a story about the coming-of-age of a precocious and curiousboy and the coming to be of the modern world.
language: English
title: Pedigree
publisher: NYRB Classics