Written over a 15-year period from the mid '90s, Garnier's short novels feature a recurring set of themes, characters and settings, and reading them side by side allows the author's 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?