The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands

Maugham arrived in the Pacific in 1917, and what he found there transformed him. The South Sea Islands became his laboratory for examining the collision between Western civilization and something older, wilder, more honest. In these stories, missionaries confront their own hypocrisy, colonial administrators crack under tropical heat, and expats discover that escape to paradise reveals more about themselves than they ever wanted to know.The collection contains Maugham at his most audacious. 'Rain' follows a strait-laced missionary whose righteous crusade against a prostitute dissolves into something far more complicated and unsettling. 'Macintosh' traces the poisonous rivalry between two British officials, each trying to outmaneuver the other on a remote island where the rules of Empire mean nothing. 'The Fall of Edward Barnard' shows a young man shedding his respectable life for something primal, and 'The Pool' dissects a marriage across cultural lines with an anthropologist's precision.These are stories about desire, corruption, and the territories between civilization and savagery. Maugham writes with cool precision about hot climates, and the result is endlessly seductive. For readers who want fiction that challenges as much as it dazzles.