Description:

Alternative cover edition of ISBN 9781590172889 Daphne du Maurier wrote some of the most compelling and creepy novels of the twentieth century. In books like Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn she transformed the small dramas of everyday life—love, grief, jealousy—into the stuff of nightmares. Less known, though no less powerful, are her short stories, in which she gave free rein to her imagination in narratives of unflagging suspense. Patrick McGrath's revelatory new selection of du Maurier's stories shows her at her most chilling and most psychologically astute: a dead child reappears in the alleyways of Venice; routine eye surgery reveals the beast within to a meek housewife; nature revolts against man's abuse by turning a benign species into an annihilating force; a dalliance with a beautiful stranger offers something more dangerous than a broken heart. McGrath draws on the whole of du Maurier's long career and includes surprising discoveries together with famous stories like "The Birds". Don't Look Now is a perfect introduction to a peerless storyteller. A pair of grief-stricken parents and a strange set of psychic sisters whose vision of future tragedy goes unrecognized; a young girl who attempts to fulfill her dead father’s wishes and thereby discovers the horrifying truth about her own past; an engineer who becomes involved in an experiment that seeks to answer the question of Death and the ultimate force of Life— These are some of the characters whose strange adventures unfold with gripping suspense in this collection of five new tales by Daphne du Maurier. Chilling and compelling, all of the stories contain elements of mystery, and some of them touch on the supernatural in very real and frightening ways. And together they represent Daphne du Maurier at her very best—full of intricately woven drama and shattering surprise endings.