Strangers on a Train: A Novel

by Patricia Highsmith, Paula Hawkins (Introduction)

Overview

"Strangers on a Train has lost none of its power to disturb…We will likely be reading Patricia Highsmith for the next one hundred years." —Paula Hawkins

Just in time for the centennial celebration of groundbreaking noir fiction writer Patricia Highsmith comes a reissue of her propulsive, engrossing debut, Strangers on a Train, with a new introduction by best-selling author Paula Hawkins. Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno are passengers on the same train. Haines is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno a mysterious smooth-talker with a sadistic proposal: he’ll murder Haines’s wife if Haines will murder Bruno’s father. As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy finds himself trapped in Highsmith’s perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, ordinary people are capable of extraordinary crimes. The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith’s prolific career, proving her a master at depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393351934
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/19/2021
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	52,736
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Patricia Highsmith (1921–1995) was the author of more than twenty novels, including Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt and The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as numerous short stories.

Paula Hawkins is the best-selling author of The Girl on the Train. She lives in London.

Date of Birth:

January 19, 1921

Date of Death:

February 4, 1995

Place of Birth:

Fort Worth, Texas

Place of Death:

Locarno, Switzerland

Education:

B.A., Barnard College, 1942

Editorial Reviews

"Unfathomably great."

Errol Morris

"An incredible study of psychological torture and how fine the membrane is between normality and the underlying darkness."

Tana French

"Strangers on a Train is a moral-vertigo thriller: Crime and Punishment for a post-atomic age."

The Los Angeles Times - Tom Nolan

"Strangers on a Train is filled with paranoia and anxiety, and through its twists and turns, we, like poor Guy Haines, are also drawn into psychopath Bruno's web."

Sarah Pinborough

"One is held by an evil kind of suspense…a rarely perceptive study in criminal psychology."

New York Herald Tribune

"A moody and disturbing excavation of guilty paranoia…Strangers on a Train was her debut novel, but [Highsmith's] sense of anxious foreboding was already fully formed."

Wall Street Journal - Leonard Cassuto

"All of Highsmith’s strengths are there in her first novel [Strangers on a Train], most notably her ability to drill inside the minds and souls of normal Americans to uncover their moral failings."

The Guardian - Peter Swanson