Set in Vietnam in the 1950s, during the last days of French colonial rule, THE QUIET AMERICAN was based partly on Graham Greene's own experiences in Vietnam as a correspondent for the London Times. The book's narrator is an English journalist named Fowler who lives in Saigon with his Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, but is unable to convince his ...
This story of bravery, cowardice, and moral decay is set in Mexico during the Calles regime of the 1930s, when the practice of Christianity was violently suppressed. It portrays the heroic and doomed efforts of a priest to minister secretly to the Catholics of the region. The "whiskey priest" is one of Greene's most memorable characters: a ...
Graham Greene's 1951 novel centers on the attempt of Maurice Bendix, a London novelist, to learn why his lover, Sarah, had abandoned him without a word of explanation several years before. In the course of the story, Sarah dies, and Maurice comes into possession of her journal, which provides an explanation that is hardly less perplexing to him ...
In Graham Greene's comic novel a staid middle-aged bank manager, newly retired, has his life rearranged by his eccentric, freewheeling elderly aunt Augusta. Henry Pulling has very modest expectations when he agrees to a holiday on the Continent with Aunt Augusta, but the trip turns into something he is, to say the least, not prepared for. Augusta, ...
English expatriate Wormold, who sells vacuum cleaners in Havana, becomes entangled in British government affairs at the beginning of the story and is pressed into service as an operative of M.I.5. He agrees reluctantly, so as to earn some extra money for his 17-year-old daughter's education, but does not bother to engage in any actual espionage. ...
Maurice Castle is a high-level operative of the British Secret Service in London. Happily married to a black woman, Castle reluctantly allows himself to act as a double agent so as to help his in-laws in South Africa, and eventually starts passing information to the Soviets. In order to evade detection, Castle allows his assistant to be wrongly ...
In Graham Greene's brilliant and harrowing psychological portrait of a sadistic young gangster, published in 1938, Pinkie, the teenaged head of a Brighton mob, becomes implicated in a murder early in the story. The only possible witness to the crime is Rose, a naive young waitress in a teashop who mistakes Pinkie's nervous inquiries for a sign of ...
This 1948 story of moral decay was one of Graham Greene's greatest popular and critical successes, though not one of his own favorites. His hero Scobie is a colonial police commissioner in West Africa. He endures a loveless marriage and a nondescript career patiently enough until he falls in love with a young shipwreck survivor who, literally, ...
This novel of politics and espionage, set in the Haiti of "Papa Doc" Duvalier., describes the course of events that brings together three men who came to the island for very different reasons: Smith, an American idealist and crank who plans to establish a vegetarian commune for the Haitian poor; Brown, an Englishman who runs a cheap hotel and is ...
When Charlie Fortnum, an Englishman who acts as "Honorary Consul" to the British subjects of a small town in Argentina, is kidnapped by Marxist guerillas, a chain of events is set in motion that draws both apathetic and committed bystanders into a confrontation with the forces of authority. Leon Rivas, a renegade priest, joins the guerillas and is ...
Greene's account of a five year personal involvement with Omar Torrijos, ruler of Panama from 1968-81 and Sergeant Chuchu, one of the few men in the National Guard whom the General trusted completely. It is a fascinating tribute to an inspirational politician in the vital period of his country's history, and to an unusual and enduring friendship.
In Graham Greene's brilliant and harrowing psychological portrait of a sadistic young gangster, published in 1938, Pinkie, the teenaged head of a Brighton mob, becomes implicated in a murder early in the story. The only possible witness to the crime is Rose, a naive young waitress in a teashop who mistakes Pinkie's nervous inquiries for a sign of ...
Querry, a world famous architect, is the victim of a terrible attack of indifference: he no longer finds meaning in art of pleasure in life. Arriving anonymously at a Congo leper village, he is diagnosed as the mental equivalent of a 'burnt-out case', a leper who has gone through a stage of mutilation. However, as Querry loses himself in work for ...
On its first appearance in 1957, Hugh and Graham Greene's "The Spy's Bedside Book" provoked a storm of interest, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, 100 copies were bought by East German Intelligence. This classic anthology, with a new introduction by the former head of MI5, Stella Rimington, includes stories by some of the great writers on spying and ...
This 1948 story of moral decay was one of Graham Greene's greatest popular and critical successes, though not one of his own favorites. His hero Scobie is a colonial police commissioner in West Africa. He endures a loveless marriage and a nondescript career patiently enough until he falls in love with a young shipwreck survivor who, literally, ...
Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner salesman, was short of money, so he accepted an offer of $300-plus a month and became M16's man in Havana. To keep his job, he files bogus reports and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start becoming disturbingly true.
For Arthur Rowe the charity fete was a trip back to childhood, to innocence, a welcome chance to escape the terror of the Blitz, to forget twenty years of his past and a murder. Then he guesses the weight of the cake, and from that moment on he's a hunted man, the target of shadowy killers, on the run and struggling to remember and to find the ...
In a prison in Occupied France one in every ten men is to be shot. The prisoners draw lots among themselves - and for rich lawyer Louis Chavel it seems that his whole life has been leading up to an agonizing and crucial failure of nerve. Hysterical with panic, fear, and a sense of injustice, he offers to barter everything he owns for someone to ...
A biography of the 17th-century poet and nobleman. Rochester was a complex and highly self-destructive figure: a sophisticated degenerate who wrote devotional verse and died of excess at 33, a nobleman who cultivated a taste for squalor, and a Cavalier with strong Puritan impulses. Greene's biography, originally written in the 1930s but deemed too ...
In Graham Greene's comic novel a staid middle-aged bank manager, newly retired, has his life rearranged by his eccentric, freewheeling elderly aunt Augusta. Henry Pulling has very modest expectations when he agrees to a holiday on the Continent with Aunt Augusta, but the trip turns into something he is, to say the least, not prepared for. Augusta, ...
This lighthearted modern variation on the classic Cervantes novel is set in the Spanish village of El Toboso. It describes the journey to Madrid made by the village priest, Father Quixote, to buy the purple socks that he needs now that, through a clerical error, he has been elevated to the rank of Monsignor. He is accompanied by his best friend, ...
Graham Greene's "long journey through time" began in 1904, when he was born into a veritable tribe of Greenes - six children, eventually, and six cousins - based in Berkhamsted at the public school where his father was headmaster. In this autobiography, Greene recalls schooldays and Oxford, adolescent encounters with psychoanalysis and Russian ...
In 1936 Graham Greene set off to discover Liberia, a remote and unfamiliar West African republic founded for released slaves. Crossing the red-clay terrain from Sierra Leone to the coast of Grand Bassa with a chain of porters, he came to know one of the few areas of Africa untouched by Western colonisation.
In this novel of politics and psychology, the narrator is a small-town British journalist who returns to London for the funeral of his guardian, Liza, who had raised him as her own son. While in London, he discovers that "the Captain," a shadowy figure who supported Liza financially, is now living in Panama, and he travels there to find him and ...
Affairs, obsessions, ardors, fantasy, myth, legend and dream, fear, pity, and violenceathis magnificent collection of stories illuminates all corners of the human experience. Previously published in two volumesa"Collected Short Stories" and "The Last Word and Other Stories"athese forty-nine stories reveal Graham Greene in a range of contrasting ...
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