The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

An American classic and the inspiration for the motion picture starring Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow.

It’s here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith’s five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.” Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. “Sinister and strangely alluring” (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving—and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche—as ever.

REVIEWS

"[Highsmith] has created a world of her own--a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger." -Graham Greene

"Patricia Highsmith's novels are peerlessly disturing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night, with the sense that an awful possibility has been articulated only to be left unresolved." -The New Yorker

"One of our greatest modernist writers." -Gore Vidal

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN:  978-0393332148
Pages: 288