Best Short Stories

Reading the stories of Somerset Maugham is rather like curling up and up listening to the delicious, risqué tales of an old, dear and rather wicked friend. You turn the pages and enter a magical world of fabulous characters, are transported to the very place, the villa, the street, the bar, of which he writes. This Macmillan Collector’s Library selection features ten of his finest and most vivid stories: 'The Letter', 'The Verger', 'The Vessel of Wrath', 'The Book-Bag', 'The Facts of Life', 'Lord Mountdrago', 'The Colonel's Lady', 'The Treasure', 'Rain' and 'P&O'.This elegant edition of W. Somerset Maugham's Best Short Stories features an afterword by writer and journalist Ned Halley.Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

William Somerset Maugham was born at the British Embassy in Paris in 1874 into a family of lawyers. Orphaned at ten and exiled to an indifferent uncle and hated boarding school in Kent, he escaped briefly to Heidelberg University, where he discovered literature, love and his urge to write. He qualified as a doctor in London, exploiting his medical experiences not to practise but to pen a sensational novel, Liza of Lambeth, that launched his career. There followed a long and extraordinary life in which Maugham produced many hit plays and bestselling novels, took lovers of both sexes, spied in two World Wars for Britain, travelled the world and became enormously rich. Along the way, based entirely on his own acquaintances and adventures, he compiled one of the greatest collections of short stories ever written. He lived his last forty years in an extravagant art-filled villa in the Riviera and died in 1965.

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