For the longest time I snobbed Patricia Highsmith thinking of her as a thriller author, but this novel is outrageously well written. It's incredible that she managed to get this published in 1952, almost 20 years before "Maurice" by E.M. Forster.

The character development, the masterful way we're made to perceive how the feelings develop between the character when they're still so hard to identify clearly... I know exactly what she's talking about, and I still have no idea how she managed to put it into words so well.