My Cousin Rachel

I remembered that morning, when she cried, she had rested he head against my heart. I had put my arms about her, for a moment, and laid my face against her hair. I wanted it to happen again. You always feel that we’re on the verge of a Daphne du Maurier renaissance. Known of course for Rebecca and Jamaica Inn – largely regarded, and sometimes overlooked, as ‘classics’- du Maurier was far more a properly contemporary novelist, equipped with a tremendously dark imagination: this was, after all, the writer who penned the terrifying short tale Don’t Look Now. Like many Du Maurier stories, My Cousin Rachel has been the source of multiple adaptations for film, television and radio and now lives again in the cinema, directed by Notting Hill stalwart Roger Michell and starring Rachel Weisz as the eponymous Rachel. The novel – available both as a tie-in edition to the new film and the more usual standard edition – charts the story of young Philip, heir-in-waiting to his cousin Ambrose’s sprawling Cornish estate. Ambrose, however, is fated to perish, and in his place stands his widow, the darkly enigmatic Rachel. Philip – the dedicated bachelor – suddenly finds his heart lost to this beautiful newcomer. But is Rachel all that she seems? Passion and paranoia conspire to create a deliciously twisting tale of secrets and lies, with Philip pitched headlong between lust and reason. Towering above it all is Daphne Du Maurier’s creation of Rachel, one of fiction’s great enigmas, the author always one step ahead of our suspicions and sympathies. My Cousin Rachel is masterful stuff from one of our very great writers of the modern thriller, ‘with an ending,’ as Justine Picardie noted in the Telegraph, ‘that continues to haunt and trouble its readers.’