The recap
Therese Belivet is nineteen, lonely and adrift in Manhattan, hoping to break into the theater as a set designer while she works behind a counter in a big department store's toy section during the Christmas rush. One day an elegant, glamorous older woman stops to buy a gift, and Therese cannot stop thinking about her. The customer is Carol Aird, a wife in the middle of a bitter divorce, and the hesitant friendship that follows soon becomes something neither woman can safely name aloud in the America of the early 1950s. When the two set out on a long car journey west, the open road offers a fragile kind of freedom, shadowed by the pressures waiting back home. Highsmith, celebrated for her suspense fiction, brings the same taut attention to watching and being watched, but here every tremor of suspense belongs to the heart. The writing is spare and luminous, alive to each glance and hesitation, and the book remains a landmark of queer literature that still feels startlingly intimate.
Why read it
For readers who want a quietly electric love story told with a thriller writer's precision, and for anyone curious about a groundbreaking classic of queer fiction.
Fun facts
- 01
Highsmith published the novel under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, fearing she would be labeled a lesbian-book writer, and did not claim it under her own name until 1990, when it was reissued as Carol.
- 02
The story grew out of Highsmith's short Christmas job in the toy department at Bloomingdale's in 1948, where a blondish woman in a fur coat ordered a doll from her.
- 03
The 25-cent paperback edition is reported to have sold nearly a million copies, and letters to Claire Morgan arrived in bundles for months on end.
- 04
The 2015 film adaptation, Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, was nominated for six Academy Awards.
