William Somerset Maugham

Somerset Maugham's irony and cool detachment make him an acknowledged master of the short story. The stories collected here are typical of Maugham's wry perception of human weakness and his unique talent for evoking a sense of time and place. They are set in familiar Maugham territory - the South Seas, Europe and America - but they are all concise and compelling dramas played out by unforgettable characters. The collection includes some of Maugham's most famous stories: "The Alien Corn", "Flotsam and Jetsam" and particularly "The Vessel of Wrath", a surprising tale of burgeoning love between a repressed mission lady and a drunken reprobate.

Who better qualified to chronicle the experiences of an author-agent during the First World War than Somerset Maugham, a writer turned spy? His alter-ego is Ashenden, a calm observer with a cool head. From his almost casual recruitment into intelligence at the beginning of hostilities we follow his progress through a series of incidents. There is the fiasco of the Hairless Mexican, a ladies' man and thoroughly inept assassin. And the pathetic tale of Mr. Harrington, the touching and ridiculous American, clumsily feeling his way through the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Most dreadful of all is the bleak story of the Traitor, whose fate reveals the real horror of the agent's profession.

These thirty short stories show an acknowledged master of the genre at the peak of his power. Most are set in the colonies at a time when the Empire was still assured, in a world in which men and women were caught between their own essentially European values and the richness and ambiguity of their unfamiliar surroundings.