By the bestselling author of The Talented Mr Ripley, Carol and Strangers on a Train
‘By opening this book, you’ve given Patricia Highsmith permission to follow you, catch you, take you apart. Get ready to run’ CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
‘Every story shimmers like a dark gem as Highsmith turns her gimlet eye on domesticity, suburban madness, toxic families and the loneliness of childhood. Often mordantly funny and always psychologically acute, this collection is not to be missed’ MEGAN ABBOTT
‘The sheer macabre, amoral brilliance of Patricia Highsmith surely makes her one of the finest writers in the English language’ RICHARD OSMAN
INTRODUCED BY CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
Patricia Highsmith was one of the great twentieth-century novelists, celebrated for classics The Talented Mr Ripley, Carol and Strangers on a Train, but she was also a masterful and prolific short-story writer. This definitive new collection, featuring two stories that have never been published before, confirms Highsmith as a genius of the genre. Peerlessly disturbing, exhilarating and savagely funny, Highsmith’s stories still have the power to startle, presenting a world that is frighteningly familiar and as relevant today as when they were written.
‘By opening this book, you’ve given Patricia Highsmith permission to follow you, catch you, take you apart. Get ready to run’ CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
‘Every story shimmers like a dark gem as Highsmith turns her gimlet eye on domesticity, suburban madness, toxic families and the loneliness of childhood. Often mordantly funny and always psychologically acute, this collection is not to be missed’ MEGAN ABBOTT
‘The sheer macabre, amoral brilliance of Patricia Highsmith surely makes her one of the finest writers in the English language’ RICHARD OSMAN
INTRODUCED BY CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
Patricia Highsmith was one of the great twentieth-century novelists, celebrated for classics The Talented Mr Ripley, Carol and Strangers on a Train, but she was also a masterful and prolific short-story writer. This definitive new collection, featuring two stories that have never been published before, confirms Highsmith as a genius of the genre. Peerlessly disturbing, exhilarating and savagely funny, Highsmith’s stories still have the power to startle, presenting a world that is frighteningly familiar and as relevant today as when they were written.
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Reviews
For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith
One of the greatest crime writers of the last century. Nobody in a Highsmith story can be taken for granted. Common decency is a thin veneer easily cracked to release an undercurrent of depravity. While this collection of her short pieces, published to mark her centenary, starts gently with a marital dispute, we are soon on a voyage into the darker recesses of the imagination
I love Patricia Highsmith . . . What a revelation her writing was
By opening this book, you've given Patricia Highsmith permission to follow you, catch you, take you apart. Get ready to run.
A writer who has created a world of her own - a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger . . . Highsmith is the poet of apprehension
The genius of Highsmith lies not just in her rare ability to evoke evil and misery, but in her capacity for making it moreish, so that one never tires of her cynicism and bleakness, even over 600 pages. Reading her is like having a devil on your shoulder arguing that decency and good citizenship are boring and cowardly, and so compellingly that you've acquiesced before you know it
If Patricia Highsmith, in her novels, holds us hostages in a maze of dark dreams, inexplicable desires, and irrational urges, in her short stories she breaks down the maze, wedges its fragments in our minds, and leaves it to us to rebuild the phantom maze and submit ourselves again to her grip
It is her rare capacity to make the reader question the moral universe in which we all hoped we lived. To that extent, she is not just a good writer, she is a great one
The sheer macabre, amoral brilliance of Patricia Highsmith surely makes her one of the finest writers in the English language
Every story shimmers like a dark gem as Patricia Highsmith turns her gimlet eye on domesticity, suburban madness, toxic families and the loneliness of childhood. Often mordantly funny and always psychologically acute, this collection is not to be missed
To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability
