The Narrow Corner

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A tense potboiler set on an exotic Pacific island by one of the 20th century's bestselling authors. 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. A tense, exotic tale of love, jealousy, murder and suicide, which evolved from a passage in Maugham's earlier masterpiece, The Moon and Sixpence.

Reviews

Maugham had a narrow but profound gift for domesticating the strange and making the exotic appear reassuringly familiar -- Nicholas Shakespeare * Daily Telegraph *
The fictional summa of everything Maugham had seen and learned about the East * Washington Post *
The modern writer who has influenced me the most -- George Orwell
He puts most 21st-century novelists to shame -- Rachel Cooke * Observer *

Author Bio

William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 and lived in Paris until he was ten. He was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University. He spent some time at St. Thomas' Hospital with the idea of practising medicine, but the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897, won him over to literature. Of Human Bondage, the first of his masterpieces, came out in 1915, and with the publication in 1919 of The Moon and Sixpence his reputation as a novelist was established. At the same time his fame as a successful playwright and writer was being consolidated with acclaimed productions of various plays and the publication of several short story collections. His other works include travel books, essays, criticism and the autobiographical The Summing Up and A Writer's Notebook. In 1927 Somerset Maugham settled in the South of France and lived there until his death in 1965.