Small g: A Summer Idyll: A Virago Modern Classic

Description

BY THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY, CAROL AND STRANGERS ON A TRAIN Completed just months before Patricia Highsmith's death in 1995, Small g explores the labyrinthine intricacies of passion, sexuality, and jealousy in a charming tale of love misdirected. 'It has a serenity rarely found in Highsmith's world' GEOFFREY ELBORN, GUARDIAN 'What is most remarkable in this novel is the empathy . . . with which Highsmith writes about gay men' FRANCIS KING, SPECTATOR 'Like Ripley, [Highsmith's characters] burn in a reader's memory' LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW At the 'small g', a Zurich bar known for its not exclusively gay clientele, the lives of a small community are played out one summer. Rickie Markwalder is a designer whose lover Petey was brutally murdered. Rickie and his performing dog Lulu are regulars at the bar, as are vindictive Renate, a seamstress, and her teenage apprentice Luisa. Into their lives comes Teddie, impressionable and beautiful, and a catalyst for the series of events that will change everything. Patricia Highsmith's final novel is an intricate exploration of love and sexuality, the depths of spite and the triumph of human kindness. It is a work that, in the tradition of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, shows us how bizarre and unpredictable love can be. Small g, in the words of her biographer Andrew Wilson, is an 'extended fairy tale suggesting that . . . happiness is precarious and . . . romance should be embraced.'

Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and moved to New York when she was six. In her senior year, she edited the college magazine, having decided at the age of sixteen to become a writer. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), was made into a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. The Talented Mr Ripley (1955), introduced the fascinating anti-hero Tom Ripley, and was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1999 by Anthony Minghella. Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland, in February 1995. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously, the same year.

From the first page it is recognizably authentic Highsmith. Perhaps approaching her lesbian novel Carol in tenderness and theme, it has a serenity rarely found in Highsmith's world - Guardian Years of producing tight, energetic thrillers has honed down highsmith's style, and in this book, with its child-like simplicity, is quite wonderfully readable - Mail on Sunday What is most remarkable in this novel is the empathy . . . with which Highsmith writes about gay men . . . one can imagine the small g existing, a piquant mixture of bohemianism and respectability, exactly as Highsmith describes it - Spectator The novel is a delight . . . all the more so for its untypically sunny atmosphere - Daily Telegraph Small g is a welcome addition to Highsmith's published novels, offering readers an insight into a fascinating aspect of Swiss society and an opportunity to explore Highsmith's final concerns and obsessions All the qualities we love about Highsmith's work...are here in abundance...her characters astonish themselves, and us, by discovering love in the very last places they ever expected to find it - O Magazine