Author: W Somerset Maugham

Though W. Somerset Maugham was also famous for his novels and plays, it has been argued that in the short story he reached the pinnacle of his art ...

Mary Panton walls up her desires in a beautiful villa high up in the hills above Florence, as she calmly contemplates her disastrous marriage. But ...

This final classic collection of stories reveals Somerset Maugham's unique talent for exposing and exploring the bitter realities of human relation...

The third volume of Somerset Maugham's Collected Short Stories, introduced by the author, contains the celebrated series about Ashenden, a secret s...

The stories in this collection move from Malaya to America and England, and include some of Maugham's most famous tales; 'Flotsam and Jetsam', the ...

Eclectic and illuminating, these essays are the last that Maugham published. Ranging from an appreciation of Goethe's novels, to an encounter with ...

Maugham spent the winter months of 1919 travelling fifteen hundred miles up the Yangtze river. Always more interested in people than places, he not...

Maugham's studies of the lives and masterpieces of ten great novelists are outstanding examples of literary criticism at its finest. Afforded here ...

Set in the bohemian café society of Paris at the turn of the nineteenth century, Maugham's exploration of hypnotism and the occult was inspired by ...

"The Vagrant Mood" is a brilliantly varied and colourful collection of essays. From Kant to Raymond Chandler; from the legend of Zurbaran to the ar...

Looking out upon the backstreets, the suburbs and the high society haunts of Edwardian London, the delightfully witty and independent spinster Miss...

Maugham found a parallel to the turmoil of our own century in the duplicity, intrigue and sensuality of the Italian Renaissance. Then and Now enter...

When war broke out in 1914, Somerset Maugham was dispatched by the British Secret Service to Switzerland under the guise of completing a play. Mult...

Kitty Fane is the beautiful but shallow wife of Walter, a bacteriologist stationed in Hong Kong. Unsatisfied by her marriage, she starts an affair ...

Crippled sixteen-year-old Catalina is the one person unable to join in the festivities of the Feast of the Assumption. But then she has a vision of...

A coming-of-age novel that moves from genteel British society to the grim underworld of Paris before the war. At the age of twenty-three, Charlie M...

Autobiographical without being an autobiography, confessional without disclosing his private self, The Summing Up, written when Maugham was sixty-f...

Charles Strickland, a conventional stockbroker, abandons his wife and children for Paris and Tahiti, to live his life as a painter. Whilst his betr...

Far Eastern Tales is a collection of short stories born of Maugham's experiences in Malaya, Singapore and other outposts of the former British Empi...

Julia Lambert is in her prime, the greatest actress in England. On stage she is a true professional, in full possession of her emotions. Off stage,...

From the love affair between a missionary and a drunkard to the mystery surrounding a death at sea, this collection gives a warm and humourous insi...

Considered by Graham Greene to be Maugham's best work, Don Fernando is a paean to a golden age of enormous creative energy. It discusses the writin...

This classic collection of stories moves from England, France and Spain to the silver sands of the South Pacific. It includes the famous story 'Rai...

Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of this spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brilla...

Down among the drab slums of Lambeth, eighteen-year-old Liza is the darling of Vere Street. Vibrant and bewitching, she is adored by the steady, lo...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARECakes and Ale is both a wickedly satirical novel about contemporary literary poseurs and a skilfully cr...

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 m...

Somerset Maugham is the acknowledged master of the short story, and his full range is represented in this collection. In acclaimed stories such as ...