Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

I'm re-reading this book after 30 years. I'd forgotten how excellent it really is. In the meanwhile I've seen the Hitchcock film many times, but the book is even better.

Du Maurier manages to inject such a sense of menace and impending doom from the very start, and this builds to a tremendous level. Her dialogue manages in a very few words to conjure up the banality of most social situations - and yet that banality so often masks hidden agendas, the unspoken emotions that we all encounter in our daily interchanges.

This is not your standard romance - Ms Du Maurier doesn't do anything standard. A young paid companion to a middle aged American in the south of France meets Maxim De Winter, wealthy recently widowed owner of a West Country estate. They quickly marry, but even from the start their relationship is overshadowed by the beautiful Rebecca - Maxim's first, drowned, wife.

Returning to Manderlay - the ancient seat of the De Winters, the new Mrs De Winter quickly realises that things aren't quite as they should be, and there is the sinister housekeeper Mrs Danvers - obsessed with Rebecca, waiting, waiting, waiting.

The truth about Rebecca's death emerges, and everyone is the loser. This isn't a romance, a murder mystery, a horror, it is a well written all embracing good tale of people and how they behave in the face of the unusual and unexpected.

Brilliant, well written, recommended. Rating: 9/10