About The Book

Edith Howland’s diary provides a reflective interlude in her busy day. This “fine and chilling character study” (Newsweek), though, charts a diary gone wrong. As Edith’s life turns sour, her diary entries only grow brighter. While her life plunges into chaos’her husband abandons her for a younger woman, leaving her with their delinquent son and his senile uncle”a tale of success and happiness blooms in her notebook. As The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Edith’s fall takes the form of an old-fashioned psychological chiller, but there is also something larger, fine poignancy at her struggle not to go under. She is betrayed by such ordinary dreams.”

Praise

“With Edith’s Diary, Patricia Highsmith has produced a masterpiece.” –The Times Literary Supplement

“Miss Highsmith is a writer of intense subtlety….She probes to the very core of her heroine with a controlled ferocity and single-mindedness that illumines every page of the novel. It is a masterly book, a haunting book, a book that lingers long in the memory and constantly disturbs and delights.” –The Times (London)

“A work of extraordinary force and feeling. . . . Her strongest, her most imaginative, and by far her most substantial novel.” –The New Yorker