The more one reads of Georges Simenon, the stranger the writer and his writings become. His novels, most of them composed in a week or two, are simple, straightforward, shallow-seeming even, but below the surface lie dark and fathomless depths.

Many readers will know him as the creator of Commissioner Jules Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire, the most unpretentious, humane and convincing of the great fictional detectives. However, his finest work is to be found in what he called his romans durs, or hard novels, including such masterpieces as Dirty Snow, Monsieur Monde Vanishes and the jauntily horrifying The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By. Now, Penguin Classics has launched a series of 20 of the romans durs in new translations, starting with The Cat, originally published in French in 1967.

The plot focuses on a Parisian couple, the retired builder Émile Bouin and his wife, Marguerite. Both were widowed, and remarried in their 60s. Theirs is not a match made in heaven. Indeed, they inhabit a domestic hell in a claustrophobic Parisian cul-de-sac, where they spend their days devising means of taunting and tormenting each other in a battle of wills that can only end in tragedy. They are no longer on speaking terms, and only communicate, if that is the word, by exchanging the briefest of notes.

The cat of the title was a stray that Émile rescued from a building site. The creature afforded him a little warmth and companionship in the melancholy of his days, until Marguerite poisoned it, or so he is convinced. In response, he mutilated Marguerite’s pet parrot so badly that it died. Now the bird, stuffed and mounted in its cage, presides over their living room, a standing rebuke to Émile, and a grotesque assertion of his wife’s unrelenting animosity and vengefulness.

We first meet them seated by the fire of an evening. Émile writes a couple of words into a notebook he keeps for the purpose, and tears out the page. “He rolled the paper between his thumb and index finger. He curled back his thumb and released it rapidly, flicking the message into Marguerite’s lap. He never missed his target, as it were, inwardly jubilant each time.” Marguerite pretends not to notice, but in the end she opens the note and reads the message: The cat. In retaliation, “she answered him wordlessly: The parrot”.

Their predicament is hideous and hideously comic, yet the tale overall is deeply sad, and becomes increasingly so as it progresses. Much of the sadness is generated out of remembrances of things and times past. Émile’s first wife, Angèle, was a jolly farm girl with red hands and a raucous sense of humour. Also she loved to make love: “I don’t know who invented this thing, but whoever it was deserves a statue.” Then one day on the Boulevard Saint-Michel she was run down by a bus, and lived on, disabled, for two painful years before dying.

Marguerite is made of steelier stuff than her predecessor. She comes from a wealthy middle-class family – her father built and owned all the houses in the cul-de-sac where she and Émile live – and her late husband played first violin in the orchestra of the Paris Opera. She despises Émile for his working-class origins, and besides, her passions all are spent, except her passion for revenge. They married in their 60s, and even at the start, when they were still speaking, “they were awkward with each other, more inhibited than very young lovers”.

Inevitably, Émile seeks solace elsewhere – though the idyll cannot last. When he returns to his old life in the cul-de-sac, relations between the couple are more vindictive than ever. And yet The Cat, for all its bleakness, is, in a strange, Simenonian fashion, a  kind of love story. Only an artist of genius could have wrought pathos out of the ghastly plight of Émile and Marguerite, lost souls clinging to the raft of their mutual dependence.

This year’s Carnegie medals for children’s writing, awarded on Thursday, brought to light an unexpected trend. At a time of widespread public anxiety about the decline in boys’ reading habits and the rise of the toxic influencers of the online “manosphere”, male friendship and masculinity were front and centre on the shortlist.

The winner, Margaret McDonald’s superb debut, Glasgow Boys, tells the story of the relationship between two looked-after children on the threshold of adulthood who process trauma in different ways. Banjo’s aggression and Finlay’s avoidance could be seen as two models of dysfunctional masculinity. Luke Palmer’s Play, also on the shortlist, tells a story of male friendship which touches on rape culture and county lines drug gangs, while teenage gang membership is the focus of Brian Conaghan’s Treacle Town.

Nathanael Lessore won the Shadower’s Choice medal (voted for by young readers). King of Nothing tells the story of Anton, a pre-GCSE hardman for whom reputation is everything. Anton hangs out with a thuggish crowd whose worldview is shaped by gang culture and Tate-like influencers. The arc of the plot – boisterously comic at first, but increasingly moving – shows how Anton’s developing friendship with the uncoolest boy in the school changes his priorities.

Though the books were judged for their individual qualities, the panel’s chair, Ros Harding, observes a pendulum-swing in publishing. “We’ve gone from children’s adventure books, where it was always the boy as the hero, then there was a backlash against that, making sure that girls could be the heroes as well, which then maybe led to some boys feeling that things weren’t being written for them.” Now, she says, “another wave of books” is addressing that.

McDonald says that in Glasgow Boys, she “wanted to explore the spectrum of masculinity that both Banjo and Finlay exist on. Finlay is the more ‘feminine’ man who we perceive to be empathetic and introverted – a very gentle person. Banjo, conversely, is the ‘masculine’ boy: violent and aggressive.”

“People have been very curious as to why I have focused on two men when I’m not myself a man. But I don’t think it would have been much of a question if I was a male author.” McDonald had a considerable struggle to get Glasgow Boys published – 60 agents and 20 publishers, she says, turned it down.

Does she think that one factor was a reluctance to publish books about boys? She believes the book’s use of Scots dialect (it comes with a glossary) was an issue, as was the fact she was submitting it during Covid. But the decline in boys’ reading, she suggests, might have created a vicious circle in publishing. “I think because there’s such a small readership it’s difficult, in a business sense, to cut out the bigger readership – which is girls and women.”

Harding says her experience as a librarian is that most boys read more narrowly than most girls. “A girl who likes reading will read anything. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a male protagonist or a female. Boys were just a little bit more resistant to that. I think they are more likely to want the male protagonist.”

When McDonald hears feedback on the book, male readers “often focus on Banjo and Finlay separately, whereas my female readers focus on the relationships. A lot of boys who read it will be like, ‘I related to Finlay’, or ‘I relate to Banjo’, whereas none of the girls read that way. So it suggests a little bit of a difference in the ways in which boys go into books.”

The hope is that they go into books at all. The explosion in so-called toxic masculinity is taking place at the same time as statistics tell us that reading for pleasure, especially among boys, is on the decline. Novels are empathy machines: they invite you to imagine what it might be like to be somebody else. So they are, at least potentially, an antidote to the misogynistic influence of the manosphere and gaming culture. But it’s precisely with social media and video games that they are competing for the attention of boys and young men.

Lessore says his book was inspired in part by discovering “my little nephew and my cousin – who were, I think, nine and 13 at the time – were both watching Andrew Tate videos”. He sees the long-term effects of that in school visits he does, to expensive private schools and “very, very underfunded state schools” alike. Children self-segregate: boys on one side, girls on the other. “Gay” is being used as an insult once more, and boys have so little respect for female teachers that they have to call over male staff to settle them.

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Does Lessore feel confident he’s talking to the young men that books like his need to reach, though, rather than just about them? “I start every school visit with the statistics that teenagers who read more tend to [get] higher paid jobs as adults,” he says. “That usually gets them sitting up a little bit in their seats.”

In Anton’s world, drawn from Lessore’s own working-class south London background, he thinks boys can find something to relate to. “Kids like that don’t think they can be writers, and therefore they don’t read – and therefore they don’t get the empathy that can be learned from books.”

Lessore’s influence seems to work. “Even the more disruptive boys on the school visit tend to, you know, barge their way to the front of the queue to get their book signed. It’s a drop. But, yeah, like: one kid at a time, one school at a time.”

A brilliant, imaginative woman; a mediocre man with too high an idea of himself, in need of a woman to destroy. It’s a dynamic that goes back to George Eliot’s Middlemarch or Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, novels that wreaked havoc with conventional ideas about to whom brilliance is meant to belong and forced the reader to see how grindingly limited these male characters’ assertions of power were compared with the women’s gifts for generosity and self-creation – for life itself.

Now, 150 years on, the allure of masculine power remains a trap that shimmers enticingly at its victims, male and female. The divorce courts continue to be flooded by men who stake everything on success, only to be confronted by the talents of their wives; men who end up punishing and controlling the woman whose proximity becomes a kind of torture. These wives can turn out to be appallingly suited to the self-sacrificing life they are forced into. Affluent heterosexual marriages are so often the sites of secret, insidious abuse and pain.

Sarah Manguso has sought a contemporary novelistic form for such a marriage, in all its dreary horror and simulated tenderness. Manguso is a master of the searing aphoristic insight. Indeed, her book 300 Arguments was a compilation of such aphorisms. “After I stopped hoping to outgrow them, my fears were no longer a burden. Hope is what made them a burden.” Her first novel, Very Cold People, was a brilliantly funny dissection of the everyday experiences of an unhappy childhood that cumulatively spun into a desolating picture of a broken world. She is well placed to home in on a grim marriage.

Jane – clearly and almost dutifully a fictional self-portrait of Manguso – meets charismatic film-maker John Bridges. They set out to construct a creative, equal marriage and apply together for artists’ fellowships, only for Jane to succeed and John to fail. Now the warning signs proliferate: he borrows money, “trash talks” James Joyce when depressed, accuses her of craziness during arguments and is way too interested in her having been briefly sectioned as a young woman. Yet they marry – he’s handsome and brilliant, after all – and conceive a child, and he finds investors to back a film production company that requires them to uproot to California.

The novel documents the steady decline of the next decade. When his company fails, John starts again, coming up with the comically appalling idea of inventing an internet-accessing mirror. They move house repeatedly, and he keeps thwarting her career – when she’s due to travel for work, he gets hospitalised, paralytically drunk. Happiness for Jane becomes merely “the temporary cessation of pain”. Motherhood gets her through; her “animal intimacy” with her son is “the best part” of her life, turning her from a person into the sky he looks up into whenever he needs comfort. But motherhood is part of the trap, because she now can’t leave; she and her son are dependent on John’s income, and her decade-long subservience has left her weak and ill with an autoimmune condition that was previously in remission.

Liars is a compulsive, claustrophobic book to read, but it’s also curiously thin, starved of oxygen in the way that Jane herself is. The years, as they amass, are necessarily repetitive. Jane marks this by writing brief summaries of her life, year after year. “I only ever served as an adjunct professor while we made five long-distance moves in less than seven years to support his career.” Manguso is writing a character who increasingly lacks agency, and the more of a victim Jane becomes, the more two-dimensional she and John end up being.

In the last stage of the book, when they finally move towards divorce, redemption comes through the next stage of motherhood: her son is eight or nine now, and the two share insights about the world and specifically about John. I worry a little that motherhood so often has to do the work of redemption in feminist divorce novels; there’s a danger that it leads to idealised depictions of this bond and denies the hard-won ambivalence that generations of feminists have claimed. But I also know it to be true, as Adrienne Rich long ago pointed out, that motherhood away from the structure of the nuclear family offers freedoms and possibilities that motherhood as patriarchal institution can occlude.

What I like best here is the way that Manguso gives the boy himself agency. “I don’t think it’s a lie when Dad says the divorce is what’s best for our family because that’s just what he thinks,” he decides carefully. The title suggests that Jane may also be a liar, and there’s a kind of freedom, too, in this. Those miniature stories of victimhood aren’t the only stories she can tell about herself.

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There’s a sense in the final stages that Manguso is pulling away from herself as an aphorist, and pushing towards a richer, wider mimetic vision. Life has supplied her with material that makes this hard; this marriage is so appallingly, predictably narrow. But by the end, marriage itself ceases to interest her. The book suddenly expands, offering other stories, glimpsed off the page, proffering the gift of another kind of world, as the novel always has.