David Kelsey, a young scientist, has an unyielding conviction that life will turn out all right for him; he just has to fix the Situation: he is in love with a married woman. Obsessed with Annabelle and the life he has imagined for them - including the fully furnished cabin he maintains for her - David prepares to win her over, whatever it takes. In this riveting tale of a deluded loner, Patricia Highsmith reveals her uncanny ability to draw out the secret obsessions that overwhelm the human heart.

As much as Patricia Highsmith wrote, there is one thing she always left out: herself. So it was a sensation when, after her death in 1995, 18 journals and 38 notebooks were found in her linen cupboard, written in without interruption since her college days.
A woman who travelled around half the world, lived at least two lives simultaneously and, from a cool half-distance, penned psychological novels about fundamental themes like love, alienation and murder.

»Every artist is in the business for his health«
Notebook, August 31st, 1966

Rydal Keener is waiting for something exciting to happen in the grubby Athens hotel. At forty-odd, Chester MacFarland has been waiting much longer, expecting his life of stock manipulation and fraud to catch up with him. And Colette, Chester's wife, is waiting for something altogether different. After a nasty little incident in the hotel, they all wait together. As the tension in their three-cornered waiting game mount, they learn that while passports and silence can be bought, other things can cost as much as your life.

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.

Tom Ripley passes his leisured days at his French country estate tending the dahlias, practicing the harpsichord, and enjoying the company of his lovely wife, Heloise. Never mind the bloodstains on the basement floor. But some new neighbors have moved to Villeperce: the Pritchards, just arrived from America. They are a ghastly pair, with vulgar manners and even more vulgar taste. Most inconvenient, though, is their curiosity. Ripley does, after all, have a few things to hide. When menacing coincidences begin to occur, a spiraling contest of sinister hints and mutual terrorism ensues, resulting in one of Patricia Highsmith's most elegantly harrowing novels to date.

›The thing looked bluish-white, was about fifteen centimetres high, rounded at the top with what looked like a convolution or crease half way down it that disappeared in the earth. (…) Oktavian returned to the gravediggers, and realized that he had been holding his breath. He supposed, he was almost sure, that the growths out there in the darkness were highly contaminous. They would combine the carcinogens injected by the doctors as well as the original berserk cells that had caused the cancer. How large would they become? And what was nourishing them? Terrifying questions! Oktavian, like most medical students, sent chums an odd part of the human anatomy once in a while. It was almost a token of affection when a fellow received such a present in the post from a girl student, but something like this? No.‹ Grotesque ulcerations, which grow to immense sizes; huge cockroaches resistant to all forms of insecticides, which take over the control of a New York apartment building; whales, the pope, a weapon-loving US president – all provide the material of which modern (natural and unnatural) catastrophes are made.

Being a writer – a harmless profession? After this book, everyone will agree: reading is safer! Sydney Bartleby has murdered his wife Alicia a dozen times over. Of course he has – after all, he is a scriptwriter and author of crime thrillers, a profession in which he has achieved as little success as he has in his marriage. When Alicia unexpectedly goes on a journey, her husband exploits her absence to perfect his artistic methods. But when Alicia fails to return, Sydney's behaviour – in strict accordance with the script – becomes highly suspicious. Patricia Highsmith recounts Sydney's (un)-stoppable descent into the deceitful world of his dreams and fantasies. Initially, he believes that he can simply go on dreaming and inventing, but soon he finds himself writing not for his novel, but for his life.

From a fishing trawler operating off the coast of Massachusetts, a sailor spots something white on the surface of the ocean. A seagull, a beach ball, a bathing cap? The pallid object that the crew eventually heaves on board has full breasts, a slim waist and hips like a mermaid – but this is no mermaid. Eleven stories of people whose very existence is torn apart in the flutter of an eyelid, as if the curtain had finally been raised – whoosh! – revealing a real and dangerous life that pushes them beyond their limits into the deep unknown. They are the stories of young girls, cowards, swindlers, the old and the young – all those who have fallen by the wayside in the struggle against the injustices of daily life.

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.

Friendship, jealousy and grief comprise the themes of this early Highsmith novel, in which two men, both in love with the same woman, suspect each other of murder when Lelia is found mutilated and covered in blood in her house in Mexico. Neither of the two very dissimilar men will confess to the crime, nor does either wish that the other was behind the murder: Theodore, a wealthy German artist, calm and reserved; Ramón, a poor Mexican waiter, vivacious and quick-tempered.

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.

›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.

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.

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.

›Strangers on a Train‹, is Highsmith's first novel and the source for Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1953 film. With this novel, Highsmith revels in eliciting the unsettling psychological forces that lurk beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life.