The Tremor of Forgery - Softcover

Highsmith, Patricia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802145647 ISBN 13: 9780802145642

Publisher: Grove Press, 2011

Synopsis

The Tremor of Forgery is considered by many to be Patricia Highsmith's finest novel. Set in Tunisia in the mid-1960s, it is the story of Howard Ingham, an American writer who has gone abroad to gather material for a movie too sordid to be set in America. Ingham is cool towards Ina, the girlfriend he left behind in New York, but his feelings start to change when she doesn't answer his increasingly aggravated letters, and John Castlewood, the filmmaker who hired Ingham, fails to show in Tunisia. Amid the tea shops and alleys of the souk, the sun-blasted architecture, and the beaches and hotels frequented by international tourists, will Ingham’s morality survive the withering heat? Includes an introduction by Francine Prose.

About this title

About the Author

Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and moved to New York when she was six, where she attended the Julia Richman High School and Barnard College. 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, 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' and The Times named her no.1 in their list of the greatest ever crime writers. Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland, in February 1995. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously, the same year.

Review

"Her best novel." The New Yorker

"Larger, funnier, and more thematically ambitious than any of Highsmith’s other novels." Francine Prose

Highsmith is the poet of apprehension rather than fear. Highsmith's finest novel to my mind is The Tremor of Forgery, and if I were asked what it is about I would reply, 'apprehension.'” Graham Greene

"Highsmith has produced work as serious in its implications and as subtle in its approach as anything being done in the novel today." Julian Symons

"Whereas we read Stephen King or Ruth Rendell to relish the thrills that come from carefully controlled verbal terror, Highsmith is not to be taken so lightly. She conveys a firm, unshakable belief in the existence of evil--personal, psychological, and political." Boston Phoenix

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802145647
• ISBN 13: 9780802145642
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272