Villa des Roses by Willem Elsschot (Granta, £7.99)

WELCOME to the faded Parisian boarding house, its motley group of guests, money-grubbing proprietors M and Mme Brulot and a tragi-comedy of turn-of-the-last-century manners.

Elsschot delivers a succession of incidents - humorous, gruesome and downright black... the monkey-hating nonagerian Madame Genron flirting with a corpse with which she is forced to share her room.

Every single guest has something to hide or divulge.

The three young sisters from Budapest "with unpronounceable names" who pay their bills "in the most varied assortment of currencies".

M Martin, who shares his large room and two beds with a Polish lady and her mother.

Louise the chambermaid, who catches the eye of Herr Grunewald "who worked in an office somewhere and had rather bad manners".

Elschott's descriptive passages are memorable and plentiful: Madamoiselle de Kerros's hair looking "as though it could be ground to dust like saffron between the fingers"; an aborted foetus being tossed over a fence... "It was a simple funeral," observes the author.

Inconsequential though their lives may be, death and separation hangs over each guest and Elschott ensures that no one leaves the Villa des Roses unscathed.

David Chapman