Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Holly Golightly is looking for Tiffany’s. Not the actual shop — or not only that — but the feeling it gives her: the calm, the absolute rightness of it, the sense that nothing bad could happen to you there. She is twenty years old, she has no last name she will acknowledge, and she lives in a New York apartment above the unnamed narrator, who is trying to write and can’t stop watching her.

Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is one of the great novellas in American literature — a portrait of a woman so elusive and so carefully constructed that she has been debated, analysed, and loved for sixty years without anyone quite agreeing on who she is. The prose is as polished as anything Capote wrote: every sentence is right, every observation exact, and the melancholy that runs beneath the surface is all the more affecting for being so lightly touched.

This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes three further stories — ‘House of Flowers’, ‘A Diamond Guitar’, and ‘A Christmas Memory’ — making it the ideal introduction to Capote’s short fiction at its most accomplished. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.