"Hey! Cheeses, what an idea! I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on a train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis! Catch?"
From this moment, almost against his conscious will, Guy Haines is trapped in a nightmare of shared guilt and an insidious merging of personalities. The psychologists would call it folie a deux...
Strangers on a Train was Patricia Highsmith's first novel, and adapted into a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock.
'A true original in crime fiction' The Times
Reissued to mark the centenary of Patricia Highsmith and the upcoming BBC adaption, Ripley, these beautiful new editions mark Highsmith's entry into Vintage Classics
'Marvellously, insanely readable... Highsmith has done it again' The Times
"There's no such thing as a perfect murder... That's just a parlor game, trying to dream one up."
Tom Ripley is enjoying his wealthy lifestyle in France, until an associate asks him to kill someone again. But Ripley detests murder, unless it is absolutely necessary. Someone else should do the dirty work for them - yes, someone with no criminal record could earn a very generous fee for doing a couple of simple murders.
Ripley's Game is the third book in Highsmith's Ripley series, and was made into a film starring John Malkovich.
These two novellas by the inimitable Tanizaki were among his favourites.
The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi recounts the dark sexual obsessions of a sixteenth-century warlord, accidentally initiated in his youth into the morbid rites attendant upon battle. Based on invented documents that overlap with historical reality, the story unfolds a masterly balance of irony and melodrama, elegance and brutality.
Arrowroot also touches on the pursuit of legend, but in a very different mode. Cast in the uniquely Japanese form of the ‘essay novel’, the narrative blends the stories of two friends on an expedition into the mountains south of Kyoto, one of them following the traces of a medieval myth, the other in search of a more recent, private past.
‘After 20 years of writing novels in a fairly orthodox style, Tanizaki fused two interests - traditional Japanese storytelling and experimental narrative – into a unique style’ New York
A woman's weekend away in the Austrian mountains takes an inexplicable and sinister turn - and becomes a fight for survival.
A woman takes a holiday in the Austrian mountains, spending a few days with her cousin and his wife in their hunting lodge. When the couple fails to return from a walk, the woman sets off to look for them. But her journey reaches a sinister and inexplicable dead end. She discovers only a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped alone behind the mysterious wall she begins the arduous work of survival.
This is at once a simple account of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one's name, and simultaneously a disturbing dissection of the place of human beings in the natural world.
She’s living a perfect life – so why does Laurence feel so torn?
Weekends in the country, weekdays in Paris – Laurence’s life features all the trappings of 1960s French bourgeoisie. She has money, a handsome husband, two daughters and a lover. She also has a successful career as an advertising copywriter, though her mind writes copy while she’s at home, and dreams of domesticity in the office.
All her life she has strived to meet the expectations of others. But when her 10-year-old daughter, Catherine, starts to vocalise her despair about the unfairness of the world, Laurence must finally grapple with a life that prizes image over truth.
Slim but powerful, this is a classic story of womanhood and its oppressors, parents and their children, and the quest for personal truth – by the iconic feminist Simone de Beauvoir.
As a girl, Clara del Valle can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future.
Following the mysterious death of her sister, Rosa the Beautiful, Clara is mute for nine years. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon to the stern and volatile landowner Esteban Trueba.
Set in an unnamed Latin American country over three generations, The House of the Spirits is a magnificent epic of a proud and passionate family, secret loves and violent revolution.
On a remote Greek Island, Nicholas Urfe finds himself embroiled in the deceptions of a master trickster. As reality and illusion intertwine, Urfe is caught up in the darkest of psychological games.
John Fowles expertly unfolds a tale that is lush with over-powering imagery in a spellbinding exploration of human complexities. By turns disturbing, thrilling and seductive, The Magus is a feast for the mind and the senses.
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