Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks

'My secrets - the secrets that everyone has - are here, in black and white.'

Patricia Highsmith's diaries and notebooks offer an unparalleled, unforgettable insight into the life and mind of one of the 20th century's most talented, complex and fascinating writers.

Focused on her formative years in Manhattan, this condensed edition of Highsmith's monumental Diaries and Notebooks reveals the writer at her most passionate and florescent. Beginning in 1941 at Barnard College and encompassing Highsmith's adventurous twenties, The New York Years intertwines an intimate self-portrait of a young artist with scenes from her dizzying social life - rife with sleepless nights barhopping in the queer underground Greenwich Village scene and always juggling too many lovers.

In these pages, we see Highsmith reflecting on good and evil, loneliness and intimacy, sexuality and sacrifice, love and murder. We see her tumultuous romantic relationships play out alongside her acquaintances with other writers.

Written in her inimitable and dazzling prose and offering all the pleasures of Highsmith's novels, these are one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to be published in generations - and yield, at last an unparalleled, unfiltered, unforgettable picture of this enigmatic, iconic, trailblazing author's true self.

'One of the most observant and ecstatic accounts . . . about being young and alive in New York City' New York Times