Small g: A Summer Idyll

Author(s): Patricia Highsmith

Location(s): Zurich

Genre(s): Thriller

Era(s): 1990s

At the ‘small g’, a Zurich bar known for its not exclusively gay clientele, the lives of a small community are played out one summer.

Rickie Markwalder is a designer whose lover Petey was brutally murdered. Rickie and his performing dog Lulu are regulars at the bar, as are vindictive Renate, a seamstress, and her teenage apprentice Luisa. Into their lives comes Teddie, impressionable and beautiful, and a catalyst for the series of events that will change everything.

Patricia Highsmith’s final novel is an intricate exploration of love and sexuality, the depths of spite and the triumph of human kindness. It is a work that, in the tradition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, shows us how bizarre and unpredictable love can be. Small g, in the words of her biographer Andrew Wilson, is an ‘extended fairy tale suggesting that . . . happiness is precarious and . . . romance should be embraced’.

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