The Talented Mr. Ripley
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3.9 • 13 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An American classic and the inspiration for the Emmy Award-winning Netflix series.
It’s here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith’s five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.” Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. “Sinister and strangely alluring” (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving—and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche—as ever.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Whether or not you’ve seen the terrific, star-studded movie adaptation, you’re really missing out if you haven’t read Patricia Highsmith’s novel. No movie could do justice to Highsmith’s insights into issues like human identity, freedom, and guilt (or the lack thereof). And it’s hard to understand how Highsmith pulls off the feat of making us fall in love with her social-climbing con man of a protagonist, Tom Ripley. By the end of the novel—when Ripley begins losing control of his life after assuming a rich friend’s identity—we were almost convinced by Tom’s point of view: Circumstance has simply left him no other choice than murder.
