The Hero

by William Somerset Maugham

Overview

Five years change a man, and when they have been spent in the bush fighting Boers, the changes are profound. So when Jamie Parson comes home with captain's pips and a Victoria Cross, he is no longer the boy he was. But not to his parents and Mary, his sweetheart...they expect him to fit in.

Jamie can't, and shortly breaks off with Mary. Happiness remains a shadow, illusive as the Boers, and Jamie finds the moral struggle as relentless as the military.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541319844
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	12/28/2016
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.51(d)

About the Author

William Somerset Maugham CH (25 January 1874 - 16 December 1965) was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s.

After losing both his parents by the age of 10, Maugham was raised by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. Not wanting to become a lawyer like other men in his family, Maugham eventually trained and qualified as a medic. The first run of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time.

During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps, before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service, for which he worked in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917. During and after the war, he travelled in India and Southeast Asia; all of these experiences were reflected in later short stories and novels.