Edith's Diary

Edith Howland's diary is her most precious possession, and as she is moving house she is making sure it's safe. A suburban housewife in fifties America, she is moving to Brunswick with her husband Brett and her beloved son, Cliffie, to start a new life for them all. She is optimistic, but most of all she has high hopes for her new venture with Brett, a local newspaper, the Brunswick Corner Bugle. Life seems full of promise, and indeed, to read her diary, filled with her most intimate feelings and revelations, you would never think otherwise. Strange, then, that reality is so dangerously different . . .

“Highsmith's novels are peerlessly disturbing ....bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night - The New YorkerHighsmith's novels are peerlessly disturbing ....bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night - The New Yorker”

Highsmith's novels are peerlessly disturbing ....bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night - The New Yorker

Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was born in Fort Worth, Texas. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, was made into a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. The Talented Mr Ripley, published in 1955, introduced the fascinating anti-hero Tom Ripley, and was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1999 by Anthony Minghella. Graham Greene called Patricia Highsmith 'the poet of apprehension', saying that she 'created a world of her own - a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger'. Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland, in February 1995. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously, the same year.

'With Edith's Diary , Patricia Highsmith has produced a masterpiece' Times Literary Supplement Edith and her family are moving from an apartment in New York to a house in the suburbs. Her son, Cliffie, will have room to play; her husband, Brett, has a new job. It's a fresh new start. Life seems full of promise, and indeed, to read her diary, filled with her most intimate feelings and revelations, you would never think otherwise. Strange, then, that reality is so dangerously different . . . 'Highsmith probes to the very core of her heroine with a controlled ferocity and single-mindedness that illumines every page of her novel' The Times 'A work of extraordinary force and feeling . . . her strongest, her most imaginative and by far her most substantial novel' New Yorker 'As original, as funny, as cleverly written and as moving as any novel I have read' Auberon Waugh ' Edith's Diary is certainly one of the saddest novels I ever read, but it is also one of the mere twenty or so that I would say were perfect, unimprovable masterpieces . . My suspicion is that when the dust has settled and when the chronicle of twentieth-century American literature comes to be written, history will place Highsmith at the top of the pyramid, as we should place Dostoevsky at the top of the Russian hierarchy of novelists' A. N. Wilson, Daily Telegraph

Edith Howland's diary is her most precious possession, and as she is moving house she is making sure it's safe. A suburban housewife in fifties America, she is moving to Brunswick with her husband Brett and her beloved son, Cliffie, to start a new life for them all. She is optimistic, but most of all she has high hopes for her new venture with Brett, a local newspaper, the Brunswick Corner Bugle . Life seems full of promise, and indeed, to read her diary, filled with her most intimate feelings and revelations, you would never think otherwise. Strange, then, that reality is so dangerously different . . .

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