The Magician Page 23

  Sir Edgar Swift. But a sudden and tragic rush of events destroys

  Mary's tenuous serenity and, thrown headlong into a

  nightmare of violence, she realises that to deny love, with all its

  manifold risks, is to deny life itself.

  Profound, moving and written with taut and vivid economy,

  Up at the Villa is a superb example of Maugham's artistry

  and craftsmanship.

  Also available from Vintage

  W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

  The Razor's Edge

  'There was in the soul of that boy some confused striving,

  whether of half-thought-out ideas or of dimly felt emotions,

  I could not tell ...'

  Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute.

  The progress of this spiritual odyssey involves him with some

  of Maugham's most brilliant characters – his fiancée Isabel,

  whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong

  repercussions, and Elliot Templeton, her uncle, a classic

  expatriate American snob.

  The most ambitious of Maugham's novels, this is also one in

  which Maugham himself plays a considerable part as he

  wanders in and out of the story, to observe his characters

  struggling with their fates.

  THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE

  The famous American publisher Alfred A. Knopf (1892-1984) founded Vintage Books in the United States in 1954 as a paperback home for the authors published by his company. Vintage was launched in the United Kingdom in 1990 and works independently from the American imprint although both are part of the international publishing group, Random House.

  Vintage in the United Kingdom was initially created to publish paperback editions of books acquired by the prestigious hardback imprints in the Random House Group such as Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, Hutchinson and later William Heinemann, Secker & Warburg and The Harvill Press. There are many Booker and Nobel Prize-winning authors on the Vintage list and the imprint publishes a huge variety of fiction and non-fiction. Over the years Vintage has expanded and the list now includes great authors of the past – who are published under the Vintage Classics imprint – as well as many of the most influential authors of the present.

  For a full list of the books Vintage publishes, please

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  www.vintage-books.co.uk

  For book details and other information about the

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