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BRILLIANT BOOKS IN BRILLIANT BARCELONA
The fantastic old typewriter above is in the Hibernian Books bookshop that I visited just before Christmas last year when my family went to Barcelona. Hibernian Books is a new and second-hand English language bookshop.
The shop has a very good selection of titles and near the entrance was a pile of one of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books. Highsmith wrote 5 sequels to her original best selling book The Talented Mr Ripley and here was her Ripley Underground.
As a writer of mysteries, and a big fan of The Talented Mr Ripley (the 1955 book and the 1999 American film) I had to buy this. I am happy to report that in Ripley Underground Tom Ripley shows himself to be the same brilliant anti-hero we’d seen before: a career criminal, a con artist, and a serial killer. Basically, a dreadful person, but his intelligence, wit and bravado manages to win the reader over and they can’t help rooting for him despite his terrible behaviour!
I also loved the cover design of this Vintage Books edition. I think Patricia Highsmith had fun…
