One of three novels by Pascal Garnier to be published in English since the French author's death in 2010, The Panda Theory is a brief depiction of a stranger's arrival in a Breton town. Gabriel is a quietly amicable traveller with a penchant for cooking and inexplicable acts of kindness. Using these talents to befriend the townfolk, he quickly becomes involved in the affairs of a lonely hotel receptionist, a man whose wife is comatose and a woman whose partner has abandoned her. But Gabriel becomes increasingly distracted by past memories and his amiable gestures start to appear contrived; generosity evolves into cruel affectation.

This often bleak, often funny and never predictable narrative is written in a precise style; Garnier chooses to decorate his text with philosophical musings rather than description. He does, however, combine a sense of the surreal with a ruthless wit, and this lightens the mood as he condemns his characters to the kind of miserable existence you might find in a Cormac McCarthy novel.