Two men meet in the picturesque backstreets of Athens. Chester MacFarlane is a conman with multiple false identities, near the end of his rope and on the run with his young wife Colette. Rydal Keener is a young drifter looking for adventure: he finds it in one evening as the law catches up to Chester and Colette, and their fates become fatally entwined. Patricia Highsmith draws us deep into a cross-European game of cat and mouse in this masterpiece of suspense from the author of The Talented Mr Ripley. Now a major film starring Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst and Oscar Isaac (Drive, Inside Llewelyn Davis). This special edition includes a foreword by director and screenwriter Hossein Amini.

The remarkable renaissance of Patricia Highsmith continues with the publication of The Highsmith Reader, featuring two groundbreaking novels as well as a trove of penetrating short stories. With a critical introduction by Joan Schenkar, situating Highsmith's classic works within her own tumultuous life, this book provides a useful guide to some of her most dazzlingly seductive writing. Strangers on a Train (1950), transformed into a legendary film by Alfred Hitchcock, displays Highsmith's genius for psychological characterization and tortuous suspense, while The Price of Salt (1952), with its lesbian lovers and a creepy PI, provides a thrilling and highly controversial depiction of the love that dare not speak its name. The Highsmith Reader firmly establishes Highsmith's centrality to American culture by presenting key works that went on to influence a half-century of literature and film. Abandoned by the wider reading public in her lifetime, Highsmith finally gets the canonical recognition that is her due.

«Now part of American film and literary lore, Tom Ripley, «a bisexual psychopath and art forger who murders without remorse when his comforts are threatened» (New York Times Book Review), was Patricia Highsmith's favorite creation. In The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), Highsmith explores Ripley's bizarrely paternal relationship with a troubled young runaway, whose abduction draws them into Berlin's seamy underworld. More than any other American literary character, Ripley provides «a lens to peer into the sinister machinations of human behavior» (John Freeman, Pittsburgh Gazette).»

Guy Haines is travelling through Texas on a train when a stranger invites him to share a meal. But the stranger has a terrible plan. You murder my father, and I'll murder your wife, he suggests. So begins Guy's journey into a world of madness, lies and death.

The Psychologists would call it folie a deux... 'Bruno slammed his palms together.' Hey! Cheeses, what an idea! I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on a train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis! Catch? From this moment, almost against his conscious will, Guy Haines is trapped in a nightmare of shared guilt and an insidious merging of personalities.