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The Collector

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The Collector

By: John Fowles
Narrated by: Hannah Murray, Daniel Rigby
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About this listen

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Withdrawn, uneducated and unloved, Frederick is a loner who collects butterflies and takes photographs.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

 Classics Horror Psychological Suspense Thriller & Suspense Scary Exciting Fiction

Critic Reviews

He has a magnificent narrative gift...brilliant
A brilliant, unusual theme... Short and spare and direct, an intelligent thriller with psychological and social overtones
Brilliant...an artist of great imaginative power
No book will make you appreciate the great outdoors more than this creepy locked-room horror story
There is not a page in this first novel which does not prove that its author is a master storyteller
All stars
Most relevant
The Collector explores two prisons: the physical and the emotional. While only one of its primary characters is physically confined, both fixate on their thoughts and are paralysed by their affections in uniquely destructive ways.

The story unfolds through presenting parallel perspectives on the same events, but does not grow tired or repetitive. Both flawed characters perceive unfolding events and the world-at-large differently, leaving it to the reader to discren where their disdain and sympathies should lie. One perspective occasionally drifts too far from the central narrative into pretension (a bit too ‘la-di-da’ I suppose), but even these excursions are ultimately necessary to the story.

The narrators are good: one is simplistically perfect; while the other’s cadence can grow a bit tired.

Thought-provoking, terrifying, and even confusingly endearing in parts: the Collector was compelling throughout. Highly recommend.

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