The Collector

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Withdrawn, uneducated and unloved, Frederick is a loner who collects butterflies and takes photographs. He is obsessed with a beautiful stranger, the art student Miranda, whom he watches from afar. When he wins the pools, he buys a remote Sussex country house and painstakingly works to make the cellar a comfortable prison. He then calmly abducts Miranda, believing that she will inevitably grow to love him in time if she just gets to know him.

Alone and desperate, Miranda must struggle to overcome her own prejudices and contempt if she is understand her captor and gain her freedom.

Taught and utterly compelling, Fowles' debut novel The Collector was an instant bestseller when it was published in 1963. It is regarded as one of the best thrillers of all time with one of the most terrifying villains to have ever been created on the page.

© John Fowles 1963 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Critics Review

  • He has a magnificent narrative gift…brilliant

    Independent

  • A brilliant, unusual theme… Short and spare and direct, an intelligent thriller with psychological and social overtones

    Sunday Times

  • Brilliant…an artist of great imaginative power

    Sunday Times

  • No book will make you appreciate the great outdoors more than this creepy locked-room horror story

    Guardian

  • There is not a page in this first novel which does not prove that its author is a master storyteller

    New York Times

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