Jill Dawson, Douglas Cowie

Jill Dawson’s latest is: ‘A beautifully crafted and utterly riveting blend of fact and fiction about a fascinating 20th-century figure.’

It’s 1964 and the eccentric novelist Patricia Highsmith is seeking solitude away from attention that ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’ has brought...but it’s clear her demons have come too: prowlers, sexual obsessives, imposters, murderers: the tropes of her fictions intrude on her retreat. What would happen if Highsmith were like the characters she created? Come and meet the writer of this brilliant meditation on the creative mind.

It’s Chicago, 1947. The Parisian intellectual Simone de Beauvoir calls up radical novelist Nelson Algren, whose closest friends are down-and-out drunks, and asks him to show her around. After a whirlwind tour of dive bars, cabarets and even the inside of police cell, the pair return to his apartment and a passion is sparked that will last for two decades. Douglas Cowie’s reimagines this turbulent , bittersweet affair in an emotional rollercoaster of a novel that shines an unflinching light on the fragilities of the human psyche.