Maugham traces the development of six friendships in Paris and London, evoking the sense of loss, despair, and unmoored personalities just after wartime.
Philip Carey is an orphan, reared by his aunt and uncle, handicapped by his club foot. When he reaches the age of eighteen, he sets out in the world--first to study at Heidelberg, then to try an accounting job, then trying to launch an artistic career. Finally he returns to London to train as a doctor, and meets Mildred, a young woman with whom he ...
Kitty Fane has an affair, and when her husband, a bacteriologist, finds out, he forces her to go with him to a cholera epidemic in the hopes that she will contract the disease and die. Once she is surrounded by all the desolation and death, Kitty begins to come to self-realization, and also learns how to love her husband. Unfortunately for both of ...
Based on the life of Paul Gaugin, THE MOON AND SIXPENCE chronicles the life of Charles Strickland, a middle-class stockbroker who flees from his London life and family, first to Paris and then to a distant Pacific island. The narrator of the story, a writer, tracks down Strickland as a favor to his wife, a society woman known for her interest in ...
Edward Driffield is a writer idolized by London's literati. His second wife commissions a second-rate popular novelist named Roy Kear to write Driffield's biography. When Kear explores Driffield's past, however, he finds out about Rosie, Driffield's first wife--who is not nearly so respectable as the woman who commissioned the biography, but who ...
On a Christmas trip to Paris after the Great War, Charley Mason meets a tragically self-destructive Russian woman whose world fell apart after the revolution of 1917.
A celebrated writer by the time the war broke out in 1914, Somerset Maugham was dispatched by the Secret Service to Lucerne - under the guise of completing a play. An assignment whose danger and drama appealed both to his sense of romance and of the ridiculous. The stories collected in ASHENDEN are rooted in Maugham's own experiences as an agent, ...
Best Known for his novels and plays, Somerset Maugham also produced the most delightfully engaging and absorbing non-fiction, of which The Gentleman in the Parlour is a prime example. First published in 1935 it is the account of a journey the author took from Rangoon to Haiphong. Whether by river to Mandalay, on horse through the mountains and ...
In UP AT THE VILLA, a young Englishwoman living in an Italian village has barely begun to recover from the death of her husband when she receives marriage proposals from two very different Italian men.
Somerset Maugham's first novel concerns a young woman who is struggling to get out of her impoverished South London life. She begins an affair with Jim, who is married and has children of his own, but finds that, as wasted and sordid as her community is, it nevertheless has certain standards and rules, and she has violated them.
Maugham found a parallel to the turmoil of our own century in the duplicity, intrigue and sensuality of the Italian Renaissance. Then and Now enters the world of Machiavelli, and covers three important months in the career of that crafty politician, worldly seducer and high priest of schemers.
From 1892, when he was eighteen, until 1949, when this book was first published, Somerset Maugham kept a notebook. It is without doubt one of his most important works. Part autobiographical, part confessional, packed with observations, confidences, experiments and jottings it is a rich and exhilarating admission into this great writer's workshop.
Long unavailable to reading audiences, THE EXPLORER is one of his early acclaimed novels set at the height of the British Empire. An engaging tale of hardship and self-sacrifice, this novel takes us from England to Africa where the success of an expedition becomes the one means to redeem the honor of a family name that has been unconscionably ...
The essays in this volume, the last that Somerset Maugham published, include an appreciation of Goethe's novels, an encounter with an Indian holy man, an evaluation of the plain prose of Dr Tillotson, criticism of three journalists, and a considered analysis of the short story.
Dr. Saunders is an eye doctor, the best in the East. He travels by boat from the Maylay Archipelago with Captain Nichols--who has been paid to take Fred Blake, a young Australian, away for a while. But when they dock at an East Indian island, Fred is seduced into disastrous circumstances.
Maugham spent the winter months of 1919-20 travelling 1500 miles up the Yangtze river. Always more interested in people than places he gave full rein to a sensitive and philosophical nature: ON A CHINESE SCREEN is the refined accumulation of the countless scraps of paper on which he had taken notes. A series of acute and finely crafted sketches of ...
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