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.
Patricia Highsmith's final novel is an intricate exploration of love and sexuality, spite and the triumph of human kindness. At the 'Small g', a seedy Zurich bar known for its not exclusively gay clientele, the lives of a small community are played out one summer, following the brutal murder of young Petey Ritter, one of the bar's regulars.
'Years of producing tight, energetic thrillers has honed down Highsmith's style, and this book, with its childlike simplicity, is quite wonderfully readable' Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday
'All the qualities we love about Highsmith's work . . . are here in abundance . . .her characters astonish themselves, and us, by discovering love in the very last places they ever expected to find it' O Magazine
'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