From the eerily outlandish (a man suffocated by countless snails) to the irrational and brutal (a child's revenge on his mother for cooking his pet turtle), ›The Snail Watcher‹ presents a gallery of bizarre characters, each driven by strange, unspoken urges.

Carefree dolce vita is the life Tom Ripley dreams of in his dingy New York basement – and the one his school friend Dickie Greenleaf leads. When Dickie's father, a wealthy industrialist, asks Tom to travel to Italy to bring back his lost son, it is a dream come true for a down-and-out like Tom. But nobody knows how far Ripley will go to become part of Dickie's world, forever. 
 
More than twenty years after Anthony Minghella's successful remake, we can finally reunite with Patricia Highsmith's most compelling character in the gripping Netflix series starring Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley, costarring Dakota Fanning and Johnny Flynn. 
Written and directed by Hollywood legend Steven Zaillian (Hannibal, Schindler's List, The Night Of).

When Ralph Linderman returns a stranger's wallet that he found during a morning stroll through Greenwich Village, he is entirely unprepared for the complex maze of sexual obsession and disturbing psychological intrigue he is about to be drawn into.

When Richard Alderman becomes a born-again Christian, his conversion rips his once close-knit family apart. He and his youngest son, Robbie, embrace their newfound faith, while his eldest son, Arthur, rejects it. Caught in the middle of the ensuing web of lies is his wife, Lois, as she struggles to keep the peace. But when the church elders start to interfere in Arthur's love life, events spiral toward violence.

In this masterful novel, Patricia Highsmith weaves a powerful tale about blind faith and the slippery notion of justice.

Howard Ingham, an American writer, is sent to Tunisia to gather material for a movie. As his director fails to arrive as scheduled, Ingham decides to stay on and work instead on a novel. Gradually, however, a series of peculiar events lures him inexorably into the deep, ambivalent shadows of this town, into deceit and away from conventional morality.

The diary of a mother who writes about the things that move her: her husband who adores her, and her son Cliffie who is doing brilliantly at the elite Princeton University where the girls and the companies all want him. And Edith herself who is a successful journalist. In fact, however, none of it is true! What Edith Howland writes about in her diary are daydreams, fantasies about an ideal world where there is no war, illness, separation, young drug dealers or loneliness.

›Slowly, slowly in the wind‹: Patricia Highsmith begins her modern-day tale of Romeo and Juliet in poetically suggestive fashion. Peter loves Maggie, and Maggie loves Peter. But their fathers, big landowners in Coldstream Heights, Maine, are as implacable enemies as Shakespeares Montagues and Capulets, intent on driving out all trace of poetry from their children. At any cost. Who would be surprised, therefore, to learn that the poetic opening is a quotation from the Watergate scandal, and that the object dangling in the wind is a hanged man! Twelve psychological stories from the Seventies about the dream of love and happiness and just how far modern people - young parents, lovers, lonely big-city inhabitants - are prepared to go in order to realise it.

Stories from The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder portray the murderously competitive desires of our most trusted companions. In this satirical reprise of Kafka, cats and dogs are no longer benign elements of a happy home but actually have the power to destroy it. 

In the darkly satiric, often mordantly hilarious sketches that make up Little Tales of Misogyny, Patricia Highsmith upsets our conventional notions of female character, revealing the devastating power of these once familiar creatures – The Dancer, The Female Novelist, The Prude – who destroy both themselves and the men around them.

Collected here in this stunning box set edition, The Complete Ripley Novels celebrates one of fiction’s most iconic literary characters. This collector’s item, featuring all five classic Ripley novels – The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley’s Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley and Ripley Under Water – is published to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Patricia Highsmith’s death in 1995. The Highsmith literary renaissance, initially sparked by a 1999 film adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley – which re-introduced fans and new readers alike to the unforgettable Tom Ripley, the debonair confidence man with a talent for self-invention and murder – continues in full force with three major Highsmith movies in the offing as well as the publication of this volume, »the most sinister and strangely alluring quintet the crime fiction genre has ever produced« (Entertainment Weekly).

The honeymoon is over, as they say, the bride dead by her own hand. Ray Garrett, the grieving husband, convinces the police in Rome of his innocence, but not his father-in-law, the American painter Ed Coleman, who shoots him at point-blank range and leaves him for dead. Ray survives, however, and follows Coleman to Venice, where the two fall into an eerie game of cat-and-mouse: Coleman obsessed with vengeance and Ray equally insistent on clearing his conscience.

Again and again the President's advisor has to recount the assassination attempt, how he saved the President's life by using his own body as a human shield. Today he finally feels well enough to »chase after mermaids on the golf course.« But the metaphor does not work, and because it does not work, it proves to be fatal. Andrew Spatz saw the young boy just a moment ago. Then the shimmering heat of midday and Andrew's feverish dreams are interrupted by a shot… from nowhere? The police say it came from Andrew's room. Ten stories from the years 1982 to 1985, about modern people in danger, about lost youths, unrequited lovers and middle-aged women and men making one last effort at happiness... Close-ups of souls that have lost their balance and who, in the midst of the crisis, acquire undreamed of (and often fatal) powers or, very seldom, sprout saviour's wings.

In this harrowing illumination of the psychotic mind, the enviable Tom Ripley has a lovely house in the French countryside, a beautiful and very rich wife, and an art collection worthy of a connoisseur. But such a gracious life has not come easily. One inopportune inquiry, one inconvenient friend, and Ripley's world will come tumbling down - unless he takes decisive steps. In a mesmerizing novel that coolly subverts all traditional notions of literary justice, Ripley enthralls us even as we watch him perform acts of pure and unspeakable evil.

Connoisseur of art, harpsichord aficionado, gardener extraordinaire, and genius of improvisational murder, the inimitable Tom Ripley finds his complacency shaken when he is scorned at a posh gala. While an ordinary psychopath might repay the insult with some mild act of retribution, what Ripley has in mind is far more subtle, and infinitely more sinister. A social slight doesn't warrant murder of course - just a chain of events that may lead to it.

In this quietly terrifying exploration of trust and friendship, a troubled young runaway arrives in Villeperce. And when, on the boy's behalf, Tom Ripley is drawn from his lovely estate in the French countryside to Berlin's seamy underworld and into a kidnapping plot that requires the most bizarre methods for intervention, the icily amoral Ripley is transformed into a generous and compassionate protector.

In ›A Dog's Ransom‹, Highsmith blends a savage humor with brilliant social satire in this dark tale of a highminded criminal who hits a wealthy Manhattan couple where it hurts the most when he kidnaps their beloved poodle.