Bøker av W. Somerset Maugham

The Sacred Flame is the story about the misfortune of Maurice Tabret, previously a soldier of World War One who had returned home unscathed to marry his sweetheart Stella. Unfortunately, after only a year of marriage, Maurice is involved in a plane crash and left crippled from the waist down. The play commences some years later in Gatley House near London, home of Maurice's mother, Mrs. Tabret.

Marion Nairn, a young widow, is spending the summer together with her young sister Lucy at Boulogne with Justice Proudfoot and his wife. The Duke of Hermanos, who is also passing his Summer at Boulogne, one day catches sight of Marion, and becomes her devoted admirer. He admires for a few days, but finally, he enters the house and declared his passion. Marion, ostensibly to get rid of him, tells him that she is married, whereupon he declares that her husband must die, and goes forth in search of him. One after another, the men in the piece are mistaken by the impetuous foreigner for the husband of his adored one, and one after another, he tries to fight them all.-5 women, 4 men

Set immediately after the Great War in 1918. Maugham called it "a farce in three acts". After the death of her husband, William, the spoilt and beautiful Victoria married his best friend, Frederick. When William comes back after the war alive after all, each man can hardly wait to surrender her to the other. However, Victoria seems to have another admirer waiting in the wings.-7 women, 5 men

Rich in humour, conflict and depth, The Circle follows Lady Kitty, who had given up a stuffy life with her titled husband to run away with a young adventurer, as she watches her niece, Elizabeth about to make the same mistake 20 years later. Glynis Johns, Rex Harrison and Stewart Granger starred in a hit revival of Maugham's sparkling comedy of manners on Broadway.-3 women, 4 men

Maugham's popular comedy of modern manners espouses that so long as a wife is supported by her husband she must remain faithful, but when the tables are turned freedom becomes the currency with which both must pay. Revived by New York's Roundabout Theatre Company...-5 women, 4 men

Witty, comedic and engrossing, this second collection showcases the range of W. The delightful satires of marriage Lady Frederick and Home and Beauty are included here alongside the insightful war drama For Services Rendered, and Maugham's tense colonial drama The Letter.

Included here are the noirish mystery The Sacred Flame, the hilarious satires The Circle, The Constant Wife, and Our Betters, and the sharp-witted drama Sheppey. Whether suspenseful or acerbically witty, these plays take a sly look at the idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies of their time.

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

Maugham's studies of the lives and masterpieces of ten great novelists are outstanding examples of literary criticism at its finest. Afforded here are some of the formulae of greatness in the genre, as well as the flaws and heresies which enfeeble it. Written by a master of fiction, Ten Novels and Their Authors is a unique and invaluable guide.

Maugham found a parallel to the turmoil of our own times in the duplicity, intrigue and sensuality of the Italian Renaissance. Then and Now enters the world of Machiavelli, and covers three important months in the career of that crafty politician, worldly seducer and high priest of schemers.

A coming-of-age novel that moves from genteel British society to the grim underworld of Paris before the war. Following three years at Cambridge and one working in his father's business, he is looking forward to a jaunt in Paris with one of his oldest friends.

In the dark days of the Spanish Inquisition, such a claim to blessedness has serious consequences, especially when Catalina seems more inclined to obey her heart than the demands of the Church. The last of Maugham's novels, Catalina is a romantic celebration of Spain and a delightfully mischievous satire on absolutism.

Julia Lambert is in her prime, the greatest actress in England. Off stage, however, she is bored with her handsome husband, coquettish and undisciplined. She is at first flattered and amused by the attentions of a shy and eager young fan, but before long Julia is amazed to find herself falling wildly, dangerously, in love.

Set in the bohemian cafe society of Paris at the turn of the nineteenth century, Maugham's exploration of hypnotism and the occult was inspired by the sinister black magician Aleister Crowley.

When war broke out in 1914, Somerset Maugham was dispatched by the British Secret Service to Switzerland under the guise of completing a play. The stories collected in Ashenden are rooted in Maugham's own experiences as an agent, reflecting the ruthlessness and brutality of espionage, its intrigue and treachery, as well as its absurdity.

Considered by Graham Greene to be Maugham's best work, Don Fernando is a paean to a golden age of enormous creative energy. This vibrant assessment of a great people at their greatest hour is full of happy surprises, curious facts and stimulating opinions that reflect Maugham's lifelong enchantment with the landscape and people of Spain.

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 most important works. Part autobiographical, part confessional, packed with observations, confidences, experiments and jottings it is a rich and exhilarating admission into this great writer's workshop

The Vagrant Mood is a brilliantly varied and colourful collection of essays. From Kant to Raymond Chandler; from the legend of Zurbaran to the art of the detective story; from Burke to Augustus Hare, Somerset Maugham brings his inimitable mastery of the incisive character sketch to the genre of literary criticism

Mary Panton walls up her desires in a beautiful villa high up in the hills above Florence, as she calmly contemplates her disastrous marriage. She turns for help to the notorious Rowley Flint, and through him comes to realise that to deny love, with all its passions and risks, is to deny life itself.

Autobiographical without being an autobiography, confessional without disclosing his private self, The Summing Up, written when Maugham was sixty-four, is an inimitable expression of a personal credo.

On his way home from a remote Pacific island, Dr Saunders travels with two strangers: the treacherous Captain Nichols, and Fred, a handsome Australian with a shadowy past. Driven to shelter from a storm on the island of Kanda, the trio meet good-natured Erik Christessen and his fiancee, the cool and beautiful Louise.

'She was a fool and he knew it and because he loved her it had made no difference'Kitty Fane is the beautiful but shallow wife of Walter, a bacteriologist stationed in Hong Kong. Unsatisfied by her marriage, she starts an affair with charming, attractive and exciting Charles Townsend. But when Walter discovers her deception, he exacts a strange and terrible vengeance: Kitty must accompany him to his new posting in remote mainland China, where a cholera epidemic rages...VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.

Eclectic and illuminating, these essays are the last that Maugham published. Ranging from an appreciation of Goethe's novels, to an encounter with an Indian holy man, with a considered analysis of the form at which Maugham himself excelled - the short story - they present the enduring views and opinions of this eminent writer.

Looking out upon the backstreets, the suburbs and the high society haunts of Edwardian London, the delightfully witty and independent spinster Miss Ley surveys a tangled web of lives; Through Miss Ley's eyes we witness the brief but happy marriage of a dying poet;