Small g: A Summer Idyll: A Virago Modern Classic

By the bestselling author of The Talented Mr Ripley, Carol and Strangers on a Train

Completed just months before Patricia Highsmith’s death in 1995, Small g explores the labyrinthine intricacies of passion, sexuality, and jealousy in a charming tale of love misdirected.

‘What is most remarkable in this novel is the empathy … with which Highsmith writes about gay men … one can imagine the small g existing, a piquant mixture of bohemianism and respectability, exactly as Highsmith describes it’ Francis King, Spectator

At the ‘small g’, a Zurich bar known for its not exclusively gay clientele, the lives of a small community are played out one summer.

Rickie Markwalder is a designer whose lover Petey was brutally murdered. Rickie and his performing dog Lulu are regulars at the bar, as are vindictive Renate, a seamstress, and her teenage apprentice Luisa. Into their lives comes Teddie, impressionable and beautiful, and a catalyst for the series of events that will change everything.

Patricia Highsmith’s final novel is an intricate exploration of love and sexuality, the depths of spite and the triumph of human kindness. It is a work that, in the tradition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, shows us how bizarre and unpredictable love can be. Small g, in the words of her biographer Andrew Wilson, is an ‘extended fairy tale suggesting that…happiness is precarious and…romance should be embraced.