Press Reviews

• Carmen Maria Machado

  By opening this book, you've given Patricia Highsmith permission to follow you, catch you, take you apart. Get ready to run.

• Graham Greene

  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

• Time

  For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith

• Megan Abbott

  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

• Yiyun Li

  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

• Richard Osman

  The sheer macabre, amoral brilliance of Patricia Highsmith surely makes her one of the finest writers in the English language

• Gillian Flynn

  I love Patricia Highsmith . . . What a revelation her writing was

• Sunday Times

  To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability

• Telegraph

  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

• Daily Mail

  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

• A. N. Wilson

  The Tablet

  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