PATRICIA HIGHSMITH: Her Diaries and Notebooks

Posthumously discovered in Highsmith's linen cupboard and edited down from 56 thick spiral notebooks by her devoted editor, this one-volume over 1,000 page assemblage of her diaries and notebooks traces the mesmerising double life of one of the 20th century's most conflicted and fascinating novelists. The famously secretive Highsmith refused to authorise a biography during her lifetime but left behind these 8,000 pages of diaries which reveal at last the inscrutable figure behind the pen. They show her unwavering literary ambitions, coming often at huge personal sacrifice, as she reflects on good and evil, loneliness and intimacy, sexuality and sacrifice, love and murder. We feel her euphoria writing 'The Price of Salt' (later adapted into the film Carol) one of the first mainstream novels to depict two women in love, and we watch her in Positano, gleefully conjuring Mr Ripley, the psychopathic and anti-hero that would cement her reputation. She describes her tumultuous romantic relationships alongside her sometimes dizzying social life involving Jane Bowles, Peggy Guggenheim, Carson McCullers, Arthur Koestler and W. H. Auden. In her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, and ever-percolating prejudices, we see Highsmith revealing the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. Written in her inimitable and dazzling prose and offering all the pleasure of her novels, these are one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to be published in generations - unfiltered and an unforgettable picture of this enigmatic trailblazing author. They comprise one of the most observant and ecstatic accounts by one of the finest writers in the English language who died in 1995. 1000 page paperback, 15 x 23cm.