Down among the drab slums of Lambeth, eighteen-year-old Liza is the darling of Vere Street. Vibrant and bewitching, she is adored by the steady, loyal Tom. But then Liza meets Jim Blakeston, charming and worldy, new to the area, and married. Soon the streets are wise to their passionate affair and Liza's fall from grace is fast and fatal. Written while Maugham was a medical student, and his first published novel, Liza of Lambeth is a vividly realistic portrayal of working-class London life.

Impelled by the desire to recapitulate and amplify those subjects that have chiefly interested me during the course of my life, Somerset Maugham wrote The Summing Up when he was sixty-four. Autobiographical without being an autobiography, confessional without disclosing the private self, The Summing Up is one of the most highly regarded expressions of a personal credo. It is not only a classic avowal of a professional author's ideas about style, literature, art, drama and philosophy, but also an illuminating insight into this great writer's craft.

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 Banda, the trio meet good-natured Erik Christessen and his fiancee, the cool and beautiful Louise.

From an orphan with a clubfoot, Philip Carey grows into an impressionable young man with a voracious appetite for adventure and knowledge. Then he falls obsessively in love, embarking on a disastrous relationship that will change his life forever.

In this edition of his collected shorter fiction we can see why Somerset Maugham, celebrated as the author of Cakes and Ale and Of Human Bondage, is also regarded as a master of the short story. Open this substantial volume at any page and you will find evidence of his extraordinary art. Without narrative tricks and in a plain prose style, Maugham introduces us to the enormous range of characters and experiences he encountered in an unusually long life and recorded with the cool accuracy of a good doctor diagnosing disease. There are many famous stories here; some of them made into films such as The Force of Circumstance, Rain, P & O and The Colonel's Lady; others, less famous, charting mundane but mysterious events in all four quarters of the world.

At the age of twenty-three, Charlie Mason is endowed with good looks, good manners and a happy disposition. Following three years at Cambridge and one in his father's business, he is now looking forward to a jaunt in Paris with Simon Fenimore, his oldest friend. Yet Paris is not what he expects. And in just a few days his young eyes are opened to the horror and ugly drama of its underworld. Published before the outbreak of war in 1939, Maugham's purpose in Christmas Holiday was to warn the complacent, insular British middle-class of the immense upheavals taking place on the Continent.