
- 10+ in stock

Impossibly evocative and romantic, Highsmith’s pedigree as a thriller writer suffuses this bewitching tale of forbidden love in 1950s New York with a simmering intensity and wire-taut tension.
Her life was a series of zigzags. At nineteen she was anxious.
Therese is just an ordinary sales assistant working in a New York department store, secretly lost in a life that feels anything but one she has chosen.
Then, one day, a beautiful, alluring woman in her thirties walks up to her counter.
Standing there, Therese is wholly unprepared for the first shock of love. Therese is awkward, with a job she hates and a boyfriend she doesn't love; Carol is a sophisticated, bored suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce and a custody battle for her only daughter.
As Therese becomes irresistibly drawn into Carol's world, she soon realizes how much they both stand to lose...First published pseudonymously in 1952 as The Price of Salt, Carol is a hauntingly atmospheric love story set against the backdrop of fifties' New York.
"It flowed from my pen as if from nowhere – beginning, middle and end. It took me about two hours, perhaps less" - Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN: 9781408808979
Number of pages: 320
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 20 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'Has the drive of a thriller but the imagery of a romance ... This is a book that is hard to set aside; it demands to be read late into the night with eyes burning and heart racing' - Val McDermid
'A document of persecuted love ... perfect' - Independent
'Gently exploratory, genuinely moving' - Mail on Sunday
'An original, honest novel, a remarkable imaginative achievement by any standard ... compelling' - Financial Times
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“A beautiful and moving story that deserves to be regarded as a modern classic.”
I enjoyed Carol, although I doubt it will lead me to pick up any of Highsmith's other novels, as I believe this is one of the only non-crime novels she wrote. I - like many before me, I suspect - came to this via... More
“A LGBT+ Classic”
"It was still Carol and no one else. It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell."
Carol (originally titled The Price of...
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