A missionary, a murderer, an artist and an exile: Maugham turns human weakness into unforgettable short fiction.
Somerset Maugham is the acknowledged master of the short story, and his full range is represented in this collection.
In acclaimed stories such as 'Rain', 'The Letter', 'The Vessel of Wrath' and 'The Alien Corn', Maugham illustrates his wry perception of human weakness and his genius for evoking compelling drama from an acute sense of time and place.
Set chiefly in the South Pacific, Southeast Asia and among British expatriate and colonial communities, these classic short stories explore moral strain, social hypocrisy, exile, failed idealism and desire. Again and again, Maugham strips away the public version of events to reveal motives that are weaker, crueller and more human than society admits.
What gives these stories their force is Maugham's restraint. He rarely presses for judgement, but lets gossip, memory and circumstance do their work, leaving his characters exposed in ways that feel sharp, ironic and deeply human.
Somerset Maugham is the acknowledged master of the short story, and his full range is represented in this collection.
In acclaimed stories such as 'Rain', 'The Letter', 'The Vessel of Wrath' and 'The Alien Corn', Maugham illustrates his wry perception of human weakness and his genius for evoking compelling drama from an acute sense of time and place.
Set chiefly in the South Pacific, Southeast Asia and among British expatriate and colonial communities, these classic short stories explore moral strain, social hypocrisy, exile, failed idealism and desire. Again and again, Maugham strips away the public version of events to reveal motives that are weaker, crueller and more human than society admits.
What gives these stories their force is Maugham's restraint. He rarely presses for judgement, but lets gossip, memory and circumstance do their work, leaving his characters exposed in ways that feel sharp, ironic and deeply human.
Taschenbuch
Four Chinese women, four America daughters - can they learn to understand each other?
In 1949 a group of Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives - until their own inner crises reveal how much they've inherited of their mothers' pasts.
'Pure enchantment' Mail on Sunday
'Honest, moving and beautifully courageous' Alice Walker
'An ambitious saga that's impossible to read without wanting to call your Mum' Stylist