Gallic Books are a publisher who print English-language editions of the very best in French fiction.
Ah, I hear you say, this must mean very arty, pretentious works full of young french students smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee while discussing Rimbaud (no, not the Sylvester Stallone character) and watching the Seine flow by.
Actually, no. The current catalogue includes murder mysteries, historical thrillers and this...
For generations, the Tuvache family have run The Suicide Shop, offering their customers a variety of ways to end it all. The family themselves are suitably miserable, humourless and proud of the service they provide until the arrival of their third son, Alan. Happy, effervescent and with a boundless love of life, he threatens to destroy everything that they hold dear - and is certainly not good for business.
How the Tuvache family cope with this threat to the family business and how Alan himself impacts all around him result in an hilarious black comedy full of surprises with an ending that both surprises and shocks.
Coming in at about 150 pages, The Suicide Shop is a remarkably entertaining short read and is well worth checking out when it's published in July.
If this is the standard of books Gallic Press are publishing, I will certainly be checking out more of their catalogue in the near future.
