The Living Room

The Living Room

Graham Greene

Fiction / Thriller / Memoir

The illicit affair of a devout woman in London ignites a shattering family crisis in the author's "ruthlessly honest" first play (The Guardian). In a dour Holland Park house with rooms and secrets long shuttered live three unyielding forces for morality: rigidly religious sisters Helen and Teresa, and their brother, a Roman Catholic priest. Into the lives of this insular trio comes their young grandniece, Rose Pemberton, following the death of her mother. To the mortification of her aunts, Rose has also brought her lover, Michael Dennis, who is twenty-five years Rose's senior, married, and a psychology lecturer dictated by reason, not faith. In a home that reeks of sanctimony, Rose and Michael are as welcome as sin. But it's the arrival of Michael's distraught wife—armed with righteous emotional blackmail and worse—that ignites an unexpected fury and makes real the family's greatest fears. Premiering in London in 1953 and...
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Journey Without Maps

Journey Without Maps

Graham Greene

Fiction / Thriller / Memoir

His mind crowded with vivid images of Africa, Graham Greene set off in 1935 to discover Liberia, a remote and unfamiliar republic founded for released slaves. Now with a new introduction by Paul Theroux, Journey Without Maps is the spellbinding record of Greene's journey. Crossing the red-clay terrain from Sierra Leone to the coast of Grand Bassa with a chain of porters, he came to know one of the few areas of Africa untouched by colonization. Western civilization had not yet impinged on either the human psyche or the social structure, and neither poverty, disease, nor hunger seemed able to quell the native spirit. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair

Graham Greene

Fiction / Thriller / Memoir

"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses a moment of experience from which to look ahead..." "This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, and it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous affair with Sarah Miles. Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of his passion by retracing its course from obsessive love to love-hate. At first, he believes he hates Sarah and her husband, Henry. Yet as he delves deeper into his emotional outlook, Bendrix's hatred shifts to the God he feels has broken his life, but whose existence at last comes to recognize.
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Ways of Escape

Ways of Escape

Graham Greene

Fiction / Thriller / Memoir

With superb skill and feeling, Graham Greene retraces the experiences and encounters of his extraordinary life. His restlessness is legendary; as if seeking out danger, Greene travelled to Haiti during the nightmare rule of Papa Doc, Vietnam in the last days of the French, Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion. With ironic delight he recalls his time in the British Secret Service in Africa, and his brief involvement in Hollywood. He writes, as only he can, about people and places, about faith, doubt, fear and, not least, the trials and craft of writing.
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The Power and the Glory

The Power and the Glory

Graham Greene

Fiction / Thriller / Memoir

During a vicious persecution of the clergy in Mexico, a worldly priest, the 'whisky priest', is on the run. With the police closing in, his routes of escape are being shut off, his chances getting fewer. But compassion and humanity force him along the road to his destiny, reluctant to abandon those who need him, and those he cares for.
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The Potting Shed

The Potting Shed

Graham Greene

Fiction / Thriller / Memoir

From the British novelist, this Tony Award–winning drama of family secrets delivers "brilliantly effective . . . enormously provocative . . . theatrical suspense" (New York Post). The Callifer family has assembled in the English country home of Wild Grove where its patriarch—a once-renowned rationalist and man of letters—nears death. Arriving unexpectedly to pay his respects is his son, James, a pariah among the Callifers, who finds a dark veil still drawn over his mysterious childhood. It was decades ago, when James was fourteen, that something happened to him in the garden shed, a black hole in his memories. For everyone else, it's an unforgettable source of unease—and for some, unforgiveable. To discover the truth, James seeks out his ostracized uncle, an alcoholic priest with nothing left to lose. What unfolds makes for "some of the most moving, forceful and compelling theatre since Eugene O'Neill" (The Harvard Crimson).
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May We Borrow Your Husband & Other Comedies of the Sexual Life

May We Borrow Your Husband & Other Comedies of the Sexual Life

Graham Greene

Fiction / Thriller / Memoir

ISBN 0140030301 Famous author William Harris is spending the fag-end of the season at Antibes finishing his first attempt at historical biography, but he becomes more interested and involved in the antics of two homosexual interior decorators intent on stealing Poopy Travis’s honeymoon husband. Which leaves him free to fall in love with Poopy herself. A widow and a divorcee tipsily discuss the inadequacy of men in general and their husbands in particular, deciding that women have much more to offer each other by way of variety in sexual love. A wife holidays alone in Jamaica’s cheap season idly hoping for excitement but finding the only man she can have an affair with is far too old and frightened of the dark. Affairs, obsessions, grand passions and tiny ardours . . . this collection contains some of Greene’s saddest observations on the hilarity of sex.
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Loser Takes All

Loser Takes All

Graham Greene

Fiction / Thriller / Memoir

Bertram had no belief in luck. He was not superstitious. A conspicuously unsuccessful assistant accountant, he was planning to get married for the second time. Quite quietly: St Luke's, Maida Hill, and then two weeks in Bournemouth. But Dreuther, a director of Bertram's firm, whimsically switches wedding and honeymoon to Monte Carlo. Inevitably Bertram visits the Casino. Inevitably he loses. Then suddenly his system starts working . . . For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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A Gun for Sale

A Gun for Sale

Graham Greene

Fiction / Thriller / Memoir

Raven is an ugly man dedicated to ugly deeds. His cold-blooded killing of a European Minister of War is an act of violence with chilling repercussions, not just for Raven himself but for the nation as a whole. The money he receives in payment for the murder is made up of stolen notes and when the first of these is traced, Raven becomes a man on the run. As he tracks down the agent who has been double-crossing him and attempts to elude the police, he becomes both hunter and hunted: an unwitting weapon of a strange kind of social justice. In doing so, he sets the stage for Greene’s next novel, Brighton Rock. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Samuel Hynes. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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May We Borrow Your Husband?

May We Borrow Your Husband?

Graham Greene

Fiction / Thriller / Memoir

Author William Harris is spending the fag-end of the season at Antibes finishing his first attempt at historical biography, but he becomes more and more interested and involved in the antics of two homosexual interior decorators intent on stealing Poopy Travis's honeymoon husband. Which leaves him free to fall in love with Poopy himself. A widow and a divorcee tipsily discuss the inadequacy of men, deciding that women have much more to offer each other by way of variety in sexual love. A wife holidays alone in Jamaica's cheap season idly hoping for excitement but finding the only man she can have an affair with is far too old and frightened of the dark.. Affairs, obsessions, grand passions and tiny ardours this collection contains some of Greene's saddest observations on the hilarity of sex.
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A World of My Own

A World of My Own

Graham Greene

Fiction / Thriller / Memoir

Graham Greene was always deeply interested in the role played by the subconscious in his writing, and the private world of his dreams was one that he nurtured carefully, recording it almost daily in his dream diaries. Selecting from these dream diaries, he prepared this small treasure for publication just before his death in 1991--a last gift from a great writer to delight and entertain his readers.From the Trade Paperback edition.
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