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A Dog's Ransom by Patricia Highsmith
Category: Fiction | Series: VMC
'Dear Sir, I suppose you are pretty pleased with yourself? Superior to everyone, you think. A fancy apartment and a snob dog. You are a disgusting little machine, nothing else. Your days are numbered.' Ed Reynolds, an editor at a prestigious publishing house, has received a number of anonymous poison pe ...Show more
A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark
Category: Classic Fiction | Series: VMC Designer Collection
With a cover design by Lucienne Day When Mrs Hawkins tells Hector Bartlett he is a 'pisseur de copie', that he 'urinates frightful prose', little does she realise the repercussions. Holding that 'no life can be carried on satisfactorily unless people are honest' Mrs Hawkins refuses to retract her judgem ...Show more
A Game for the Living: A Virago Modern Classic by Patricia Highsmith
Category: Fiction | Series: VMC
'Ramón had done it. Obviously! He thought about Ramón, his Catholic soul trapped in his passion for Lelia. He'd find Ramón and see that he paid with his life for what he had done.' Mild-mannered Theo is a wealthy German expatriate; hot-tempered Ramón was born into poverty in Mexico City. The two men ar ...Show more
A Suspension of Mercy: A Virago Modern Classic by Patricia Highsmith
Category: Crime and Thrillers | Series: VMC
Sydney Bartleby has killed his wife. At least, he has thought about it, compulsively, repeatedly, plotting schemes, designing escapes, forging alibis. Of course he has; he's a thriller writer. He even knows how to dispose of her body. But when Alicia takes a long, unannounced holiday, Sydney descends in ...Show more
A View Of The Harbour: A Virago Modern Classic by Elizabeth Taylor
Category: Classic Fiction | Series: Virago Modern Classics,VMC Designer Collection
'Her stories remain with one, indelibly, as though they had been some turning-point in one's own experience' - Elizabeth Bowen In the faded coastal village of Newby, everyone looks out for - and in on - each other, and beneath the deceptively sleepy exterior, passions run high. Beautiful divorcee Tory ...Show more
An Episode of Sparrows (Modern Classic) by Rumer Godden
Category: Fiction | Series: VMC
Someone has been digging up the private garden in the Square. Miss Angela Chesney of the Garden Committee is sure that a gang of local boys is to blame, but her sister, Olivia, isn't so sure. She wonders why the neighbourhood children - 'sparrows', she calls them - have to be locked out: don't they have ...Show more
August Folly: A Virago Modern Classic by Angela Thirkell
Category: Fiction | Series: VMC
It's August in the Barsetshire village of Worsted, and Richard Tebben, just down from Oxford, is contemplating the gloomy prospect of a long summer in the parental home. But the numerous and impossibly glamorous Dean family - exquisite Rachel, her capable husband and six of their nine brilliant children ...Show more
Before Lunch by Angela Thirkell
Category: Fiction | Series: VMC
Jack Middleton likes to imagine himself a country squire. At weekends he retires to Laverings Estate with his wife, Catherine. He may be pompous, and they may seem ill-matched, but the couple are devoted to each other. When Jack's widowed sister, Lilian, and her two stepchildren arrive to spend the sum ...Show more
Boy Who Followed Ripley: A Virago Modern Classic by Patricia Highsmith
Category: Classic Fiction | Series: VMC
When a troubled young runaway arrives on Tom Ripley's French estate, he is drawn into a world he thought he'd left behind: the seedy underworld of Berlin, involving kidnapping plots, lies and deception. Ripley becomes the boy's protector as friendship develops between the young man with a guilty conscie ...Show more
Death Comes For the Archbishop by Cather Willa
Category: Classic Fiction | Series: VMC
In 1851 Bishop Latour and his friend Father Valliant are despatched to New Mexico to reawaken its slumbering Catholicism. Moving along the endless prairies, Latour spreads his faith the only way he knows - gently, although he must contend with the unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly reb ...Show more
Deep Water: The compulsive classic thriller from the author of THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY by Patricia Highsmith
Category: Classic Fiction | Series: VMC
'If I really don't like somebody, I kill him ...You remember Malcolm McRae, don't you?' Melinda Van Allen is beautiful, headstrong and sexy. Unfortunately for Vic Van Allen, she is his wife. Their love has soured, and Melinda takes pleasure in flaunting her many affairs to her husband. When one of her l ...Show more
Don't Look Now and Other Stories by Daphne Du Maurier
Category: Fiction | Series: VMC
John and Laura have come to Venice to try and escape the pain of their young daughter's death. But when they encounter two old women who claim to have second sight, they find that instead of laying their ghosts to rest they become caught up in a train of increasingly strange and violent events. The ...Show more