The Widow Couderc (Romans Durs)

A man and a woman are drawn together in this dark, existentialist masterpiece by Georges Simenon.

Two strangers meet on a bus along a dusty road in rural France. Tati is a tough, work-worn widow, who runs the farm her late husband left behind, while trying to keep out of the way of her predatory in-laws. Jean is an odd, quiet man, recently out of prison, and in search of a new life. These lost souls recognize something in each other, and Jean becomes Tati’s lodger and farmworker.

In the still and heat of the summer, the pair labor together and, inevitably, begin to sleep together. Soon, however, their strange affair will become something altogether darker. First published in 1942 at the same time as Albert Camus’s The Outsider, The Widow Couderc is Georges Simenon’s existentialist masterpiece, the story of fatal attraction, an unsettling exploration of who we are and what we desire.