Of Human Bondage

The short stories in this extraordinary collection -- with the exception of one -- were written after the close of World War I. Maugham shrewdly and brilliantly exploited the public taste of his time to put on display the changing morality of the century. An expert storyteller, he was also a master of fictional technique. His fiction offers a synthesis of pleasures in the form of realism, exoticism, shrewd and ironic observation, careful craftsmanship, and characterization. Among the stories included in Creatures of Circumstance are "The Colonel's Lady", "Flotsam and Jetsam", "Sanatorium", "Appearance and Reality", "The Point of Honour", "A Woman of Fifty", "The Man from Glasgow", and "The Kite".