Patricia Highsmith has 13 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 13 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 165 ratings. The most-rated is The Talented Mr. Ripley.
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Summary
Since his debut in 1955, Tom Ripley has evolved into the ultimate bad boy sociopath, influencing countless novelists and filmmakers. In this first novel, we are introduced to suave, handsome Tom Ripley: a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan in the 1950s. A product of a broken home, branded a "sissy" by his dismissive Aunt Dottie, Ripley becomes enamored of the moneyed world of his new friend, Dickie Greenleaf. This fondness turns obsessive when Ripley is sent to Italy to bring back his libertine pal, but he grows enraged by Dickie's ambivalent feelings for Marge, a charming American dilettante. A dark reworking of Henry James's The Ambassadors, The Talented Mr. Ripley—immortalized in the 1998 film starring Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Gywneth Paltrow—is an unforgettable introduction to this debonair confidence man, whose talent for self-invention and calculated murder is chronicled in four subsequent novels.
©1955 Patricia Highsmith. Copyright renewed 1983 by Patricia Highsmith. (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Carol - The Price of Salt
Summary
A chance encounter between two lonely women leads to a passionate romance in this lesbian cult classic. Therese, a struggling young sales clerk, and Carol, a homemaker in the midst of a bitter divorce, abandon their oppressive daily routines for the freedom of the open road, where their love can blossom. But their newly discovered bliss is shattered when Carol is forced to choose between her child and her lover. Highsmith's sensitive treatment of fully realized characters who defy stereotypes about homosexuality marks a departure from previous lesbian pulp fiction. Erotic, eloquent, and suspenseful, this story offers an honest look at the necessity of being true to one's nature. The Price of Salt is the basis for the upcoming film Carol, starring Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchett, and Kyle Chandler, to be released December 18, 2015.
©2015 Patricia Highsmith (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Strangers on a Train
Summary
In Patricia Highsmith's debut novel, we encounter Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, passengers on the same train. But while Guy is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno turns out to be a sadistic psychopath who manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy is trapped in Highsmith's perilous world - where, under the right circumstances, anybody is capable of murder. The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith on a prolific career of noir fiction and proved her mastery of depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life.
©2015 Patricia Highsmith (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Ripley Underground
Summary
The Buckmaster Gallery is staging another Derwatt exhibition, but now an American collector claims that the expensive masterpiece he bought three years ago is a fake. It is, of course, and he wants to talk to Derwatt, but Derwatt, inconveniently, is dead. Ripley needs the perfect solution to keep his role in the fraud a secret and his reputation clean, but not everyone's nerves are as steady as his. Especially when it comes to murder.
©1970 Patricia Highsmith. 1993 by Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
The Boy Who Followed Ripley
Summary
Now part of American film and literary lore, Tom Ripley, "a bisexual psychopath and art forger who murders without remorse when his comforts are threatened" (New York Times Book Review), was Patricia Highsmith's favorite creation. In The Boy Who Followed Ripley, Highsmith explores Ripley's bizarrely paternal relationship with a troubled young runaway, whose abduction draws them into Berlin's seamy underworld. More than any other American literary character, Ripley provides "a lens to peer into the sinister machinations of human behavior." (John Freeman, Pittsburgh Gazette).
©1980 Patricia Highsmith. 1993 by Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
The Blunderer
Summary
For two years, Walter Stackhouse has been a faithful and supportive husband to his wife, Clara. But she is distant and neurotic, and Walter finds himself harboring gruesome fantasies about her demise. When Clara's dead body turns up at the bottom of a cliff in a manner uncannily resembling the recent death of a woman who was murdered by her husband, Walter finds himself under intense scrutiny. He commits several blunders that claim his career and his reputation, cost him his friends, and eventually threaten his life. The Blunderer examines the dark obsessions that lie beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary people. With unerring psychological insight, Patricia Highsmith portrays characters who cross the precarious line separating fantasy from reality.
©2015 Patricia Highsmith (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Patricia Highsmith
Summary
The remarkable renaissance of Patricia Highsmith continues with the publication of Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories, featuring the groundbreaking novels Strangers on a Train and The Price of Salt as well as a trove of penetrating short stories. With a critical introduction by Joan Schenkar, situating Highsmith’s classic works within her own tumultuous life, this book provides a useful guide to some of her most dazzlingly seductive writing. Strangers on a Train, transformed into a legendary film by Alfred Hitchcock, displays Highsmith’s genius for psychological characterization and tortuous suspense, while The Price of Salt, with its lesbian lovers and a creepy PI, provides a thrilling and highly controversial depiction of “the love that dare not speak its name”. This book firmly establishes Highsmith’s centrality to American culture by presenting key works that went on to influence half a century of literature and film. Abandoned by the wider reading public in her lifetime, Highsmith finally gets the canonical recognition that is her due.
©2011 Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich; 1993 by Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich; Introduction 2011 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Ripley Under Water
Summary
Tom Ripley passes his leisured days at his French country estate tending the dahlias, practicing the harpsichord, and enjoying the company of his lovely wife, Heloise. Never mind the bloodstains on the basement floor. But some new neighbors have moved to Villeperce: the Pritchards, just arrived from America. they are a ghastly pair, with vulgar manners and even more vulgar taste. Most inconvenient, though, is their curiosity. Ripley does, after all, have a few things to hide. When menacing coincidences begin to occur, a spiraling contest of sinister hints and mutual terrorism ensues, resulting in one of Patricia Highsmith's most elegantly harrowing novels to date.
©1991 Patricia Highsmith. © 1993 by Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Deep Water
Summary
The great revival of interest in Patricia Highsmith continues with this work that reveals the chilling reality behind the idyllic facade of American suburban life. In Deep Water, set in the small town of Little Wesley, Vic and Melinda Meller's loveless marriage is held together only by a precarious arrangement whereby in order to avoid the messiness of divorce, Melinda is allowed to take any number of lovers as long as she does not desert her family. Eventually, Vic tries to win her back by asserting himself through a tall tale of murder - one that soon comes true.
©1985 Patricia Highsmith (P)2013 Random House Audio
The Greatest Mysteries of All Time, Volume 5
Summary
The Greatest Mysteries of All Time, Volume 5 is an exciting addition to this series, featuring the finest short-story mystery fiction by the most acclaimed writers, past and present. This unique collection of master writers, including such notables as Isaac Asimov, Ogden Nash, and Mickey Spillane, edited by multi-award-winning mystery connoisseur Otto Penzler, is a delightful mixture of mystery and suspense.
Public Domain (P)1998 Phoenix
Eleven
Summary
The legendary writer Patricia Highsmith is best remembered today for her chilling psychological thrillers The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train. A critically acclaimed, best-selling author in Europe, Highsmith has for too long been underappreciated in the United States. Eleven is Highsmith's first collection of short stories, an arresting group of dark masterpieces of obsession and foreboding, violence and instability. Here naturalists meet gruesome ends and unhinged heroes disturb our sympathies. This is a captivating, important collection from "one of the truly brilliant short-story writers of the 20th century" (Otto Penzler). Includes an introduction by Graham Greene.
©1945, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970 Patricia Highsmith (P)2021 Tantor
Those Who Walk Away
Summary
Ray Garrett, a wealthy young American living in Europe, is grieving over the death of his wife. Ray is at a loss for why she would take her own life, but Peggy's father, Ed Coleman, has no such uncertainty - he blames Ray completely. Late one night in Rome, Coleman shoots Ray at point-blank range. He thinks he's had his revenge, but Ray survives and follows Coleman and his wealthy girlfriend to Venice. In Venice, it happens again: Coleman attacks his loathed son-in-law, dumping him into the cold waters of the laguna. Ray survives with the help of a boatman - and this time he goes into hiding, living in a privately rented room under a fake name. So begins an eerie game of cat and mouse. Coleman wants vengeance, Ray wants a clear conscience, and the police want to solve the mystery of what happened to the missing American. As Ray and Coleman stalk each other through the narrow streets and canals, the hotels and bars of the beguiling city, Those Who Walk Away becomes a literary thriller that simmers with violence and unease from the acclaimed author of such classics as Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
©1993 Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich (P)2020 Tantor
The Tremor of Forgery
Summary
An expatriate is beset by dark temptations in this tale by the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley: "Her best novel" (The New Yorker). Set in Tunisia in the mid-1960s, this 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 toward the girlfriend he left behind in New York - but his feelings start to change when she doesn't answer his increasingly aggravated letters and 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, Ingham tries to pass the time by working on a writing project. But a series of peculiar events - a hushed-up murder, a vanished corpse, secret broadcasts to the Soviet Union - will pull him in and may finally put his increasingly fragile sense of morality to the test.
©1969 Patricia Highsmith (P)2021 Tantor