Far Eastern Tales

W Somerset Maugham author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

£9.99

Available to order, but very limited on stock - if we have issues obtaining a copy, we will let you know.

Far Eastern Tales cover

Mesmerising short stories by this neglected 20th century master

Whether portraying a ship-borne flight from a lover's curse, murder in the jungle, or a marriage shattered by a past indiscretion, they all reveal Maugham at his best - sometimes caustic, sometimes gently comic, but always the shrewd and human judge of character and soul.Far Eastern Tales is a collection of short stories born of Maugham's experiences in Malaya, Singapore and other outposts of the former British Empire. Whether portraying a ship-borne flight from a lover's curse, murder in the jungle, or a marriage shattered by a past indiscretion, they all reveal Maugham at his best - sometimes caustic, sometimes gently comic, but always the shrewd and human judge of character and soul.

If all else perish, there will remain a storyteller's world...that is exclusively and forever Maugham, a world of verandah and prahu which we enter as well as we do that of Conan Doyle's Baker Street, and with a happy and eternal homecoming * The Times *
Maugham teases out buried secrets as mesmerising as the heat and as menacing as the surrounding jungle * Observer *
Ideally you should listen to these stories lying in a long cane chair on the veranda of a dark bungalow sipping a gin and bitters - not that Maugham's writing needs any further atmospheric embellishment. Like Kipling and Conrad, Maugham transports us to a long-since-vanished and distinctly non-PC world of hard-drinking colonial planters and traders and their frosty memsahibs * Guardian *

ISBN: 9780099282846

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 17mm

Weight: 202g

288 pages