William Somerset Maugham
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Language
English
Description
Of Human Bondage is Maugham's masterpiece strongly autobiographical in nature, although Maugham denied this stating that this was a novel not an autobiography. Though much in it was autobiographical, more is pure invention. Of Human Bondage is often included in lists of best English-language novels of the 20th century.
Author
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English
Description
These are the memoirs of the Beato Giuliano, brother of the Order of St Francis of Assisi, known in his worldly life as Filippo Brandolini; of which family I, Giulo Brandolini, am the last descendant. On the death of Fra Giuliano the manuscript was given to his nephew Leonello, on whom the estates devolved; and has since been handed down from father to son, as the relic of a member of the family whose piety and good works still shed lustre on the...
3) The Magician
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Language
English
Description
Maugham wrote The Magician in London after he had spent some time living in Paris, where he met Aleister Crowley. In this tale, the magician of the title, Oliver Haddo, a caricature of Aleister Crowley, attempts to create life. Crowley wrote a critique of this book under the pen name Oliver Haddo, in which he accused Maugham of plagiarism.
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English
Description
The Pacific is inconstant and uncertain like the soul of man. Sometimes it is grey like the English Channel off Beachy Head, with a heavy swell, and sometimes it is rough, capped with white crests, and boisterous. It is not so often that it is calm and blue. Then, indeed, the blue is arrogant. The sun shines fiercely from an unclouded sky. The trade wind gets into your blood and you are filled with an impatience for the unknown. The billows, magnificently...
5) Orientations
Author
Language
English
Description
Xiormonez is the most inaccessible place in Spain. Only one train arrives there in the course of the day, and that arrives at two o'clock in the morning; only one train leaves it, and that starts an hour before sunrise. No one has ever been able to discover what happens to the railway officials during the intermediate one-and-twenty hours. A German painter I met there, who had come by the only train, and had been endeavouring for a fortnight to get...
6) The Hero
Author
Language
English
Description
James Parsons returns from the Boer War a changed man. In his idyllic and stifling British village awarded the Victoria Cross for an act of bravery, he considers the medal unwarranted. He was praised and respected in the village of Little Primpton before breaking off his engagement to the woman who has been waiting five years for his return.
Author
Language
English
Description
All her life Miss Elizabeth Dwarris had been a sore trial to her relations. A woman of means, she ruled tyrannously over a large number of impecunious cousins, using her bank-balance like the scorpions of Rehoboam to chastise them, and, like many another pious creature, for their soul's good making all and sundry excessively miserable. Nurtured in the evangelical ways current in her youth, she insisted that her connections should seek salvation according...
Author
Language
English
Description
Strickland is a well-off, middle-class stockbroker in London sometime in late 19th or early 20th century. Early in the novel, he leaves his wife and children and goes to Paris. He lives a destitute but defiantly content life there as a painter, lodging in run-down hotels and falling prey to both illness and hunger. Strickland, in his drive to express through his art what appears to continually possess and compel him on the inside, cares nothing for...
Author
Language
English
Description
On her 21st birthday, when she comes into her deceased father's money, Bertha Ley announces, to the dismay of her former guardian, that she is going to marry 27-year-old Edward Craddock, her steward. Herself a member of the landed gentry, Bertha has been raised to cultivate an immoderate desire for knowledge and to understand, and enjoy, European culture of both past and present ages. In particular, during long stays on the Continent, she has learned...
Author
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English
Description
The world takes people very willingly at the estimate in which they hold themselves. With a fashionable bias for expression in a foreign tongue it calls modesty mauvaise honte; and the impudent are thought merely to have a proper opinion of their merit. But Ponsonby was really an imposing personage. His movements were measured and noiseless; and he wore the sombre garb of a gentleman's butler with impressive dignity. He was a large man, flabby and...
11) The Explorer
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English
Description
The sea was very calm. There was no ship in sight, and the sea-gulls were motionless upon its even greyness. The sky was dark with lowering clouds, but there was no wind. The line of the horizon was clear and delicate. The shingly beach, no less deserted, was thick with tangled seaweed, and the innumerable shells crumbled under the feet that trod them. The breakwaters, which sought to prevent the unceasing encroachment of the waves, were rotten with...
12) Liza of Lambeth
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Language
English
Description
Liza of Lambeth depicts the short life and death of Liza Kemp, an 18-year-old factory worker who lives with her aging mother in the fictional Vere Street off Westminster Bridge Road in Lambeth.
13) The Painted Veil
Author
Language
English
Description
The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham is a story about a woman named Kitty, who marries Walter Fane so that she can live out her fantasies of being a lady in a grand household and meet wealthy people. The marriage to Walter Fane only lasts three years because he begins to cheat on her. Kitty leaves him for Shanghai, China to work as a doctor with the Red Cross Society.