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Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize
'Brilliantly done . . . the period detail never overwhelms the simple, passionate human story. It's a tour-de-force of hints, clues and dropped threads' Suzi Feay, Independent on Sunday
Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch is the work of a truly brilliant and compelling storyteller.
This is the story of four Londoners - three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy. Kay, who drove an ambulance during the war and lived life at full throttle, now dresses in mannish clothes and wanders the streets with a restless hunger, searching . . . Helen, clever, sweet, much-loved, harbours a painful secret . . . Viv, glamour girl, is stubbornly, even foolishly loyal, to her soldier lover . . . Duncan, an apparent innocent, has had his own demons to fight during the war. Their lives, and their secrets connect in sometimes startling ways. War leads to strange alliances . . .
Tender, tragic and beautifully poignant, set against the backdrop of feats of heroism both epic and ordinary, here is a novel of relationships that offers up subtle surprises and twists. The Night Watch is thrilling. A towering achievement. -
BY THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY, CAROL AND STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
'Patricia Highsmith has an extraordinary talent for the sinister' ROBERT NYE, GUARDIAN
'For elicting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith' TIME
'It's Kafka with a vengeance . . . compulsive' SPECTATOR
Robert Forester, depressed after a painful divorce, begins to spy on Jenny, his pretty young neighbour. Watching her, bright and seemingly carefree, alleviates his loneliness and helps him escape the discontent of his life. Caught in the act, he is surprised when Jenny invites him in, but all is not what it seems.
With striking clarity and horrible inevitability, Forester becomes caught up in a series of deaths in which he, although the innocent bystander, is presumed guilty.
'The No.1 Greatest Crime Writer' THE TIMES -
This is the second novel in Highsmith's hugely influential, groundbreaking Ripley series.
'The No.1 Greatest Crime Writer' The Times
Tom Ripley is now the owner of a beautiful estate in France, a wealthy art collector and married to an heiress. The Buckmaster Gallery is staging an exhibition by the celebrated artist, Derwatt, but an American collector claims that the expensive masterpiece he bought three years ago is a fake. It is, of course and he wants to talk to Derwatt - but Derwatt, inconveniently, is dead.
Ripley needs the perfect solution to keep his role in the fraud a secret and his reputation clean, but not everyone's nerves are as steady as his. Especially when it comes to murder.
Ripley Under Ground is an ingenious novel of masks and identity, illusion and reality, and is followed by Ripley's Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley and Ripley Under Water. -
BY THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY, CAROL AND STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
'Patricia Highsmith has an extraordinary talent for the sinister' GUARDIAN
'Highsmith was a genuine one-off, and her books will haunt you' DAILY TELEGRAPH
'A border zone of the macabre, the disturbing, the not-quite accidental' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Horrific tragedy becomes disturbingly ordinary in The Black House, a masterful collection of short stories, written during a particularly dark time in Patricia Highsmith's life. It eerily evokes the warm familiarities of suburban life: the manicured lawns, the white picket fences and the local pubs, each providing the setting for Highsmith's chilling portraits.
Some neighbours are playing scrabble one evening when their cat drags into their house not a bird, or some other catch, but human fingers; a guest arrives at a dinner party where he is not welcome, and his hosts conspire to find and attack his Achilles heel; the crew of the Emma C rescue a beautiful girl floating unconscious in the sea and tension explodes between the men on board; a childless thirty-something couple decide to invite two elderly folk to live with them, but have they been too generous?
In this collection of Patricia Highsmith's wonderfully unsettling short stories, people's motives are frequently twisted and no occurrence is without a sinister underlying meaning . . . -
BY THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY AND STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
INTRODUCED BY DENISE MINA
'Highsmith is a giant of the genre. The original, the best, the gloriously twisted Queen of Suspense' MARK BILLINGHAM
'She kind of takes you by the hand and walks you toward the cliff. I like that sensation' GILLIAN FLYNN
'One of Highsmith's finest novels' NEW YORK TIMES
A gripping novel that explores the shifting sands of moral values - is murder still murder when committed in a lawless place?
Howard Ingham, an American writer, is in Tunisia working on a screenplay, and feeling stranded. No one has written to him since he arrived - neither the film director who he is supposed to be meeting in Tunis, nor his lover in New York.
The erratic mail eventually brings news of the director's suicide. For reasons obscure even to himself, Ingham decides to stay and work on a novel, but a series of events - a hushed-up murder and a vanished corpse - lures him inexorably into the deep, ambivalent shadows of the town; into deceit and away from conventional morality. Ultimately, what is in question is not justice or truth, but the state of his oddly quiet conscience.
'Highsmith is the poet of apprehension rather than fear . . . Highsmith's finest novel to my mind is The Tremor of Forgery, and if I were asked what it is about I would reply, "apprehension"' GRAHAM GREENE