Daphne Du Maurier

Taking a hallucinogenic drug enables a man to travel into the past.

Before she wrote Rebecca, the novel that would cement her reputation as a twentieth-century literary giant, a young Daphne du Maurier penned short fiction in which she explored the images, themes, and concerns that informed her later work. Originally published in periodicals during the early 1930s, many of these stories never found their way into print again . . . until now. Tales of human frailty and obsession, and of romance gone tragically awry,...

The coachman tried to warn young Mary Yellan away from the ruined, forbidding place on the rainswept Cornish coast. But May chose instead to honor her mother's dying request that she join her frightened Aunt Patience and foreboding Uncle Joss Merlyn at Jamaica Inn. From her first glimpse on that raw November eve, she could sense the inn's dark power. Mary never imagined that she would become hopelessly ensnared in the vile, villainous schemes being...

Master storyteller Daphne du Maurier, bestselling author of Rebecca, conjures a chilling tale in which the line between good and evil is blurred and suspicions run rampant. An ever-charming Italian courier, Armino Fabbio finds his life wildly shaken up when a mysterious murder compels him to return to his birthplace Ruffano to investigate the victim's identity. Haunted by its violent past and a sinister former duke known as The Falcon, his home is...

In this dramatic story of a family of master craftsmen, we are treated to an aspect of the French Revolution seldom touched on--the Civil War that originated in Vendee.

"Emma wakes up one morning to an apocalyptic world. The cosy existence she shares with her grandmother, a famous retired actress, has been shattered: there's no post, no telephone, no radio and an American warship sits in the harbour. As the two women piece together clues about the 'friendly' military occupation on their doorstep, family, friends and neighbours gather round to protect their heritage." -- Back cover.

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...