Cakes and Ale — W. Somerset Maugham

Description

W. Somerset Maugham's 1930 novel: the aging writer William Ashenden is asked to help produce a reverent biography of a recently deceased literary giant — and finds himself recalling the great man's first wife, Rosie, whose warmth, appetite for life, and refusal to be respectable outshines every "great man" in the book. Widely considered Maugham's finest and most personal novel.

Format: ePub (compatible with Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, and all major e-readers)

Edition: U.S. public domain edition, text courtesy of Standard Ebooks (CC0). This work entered the U.S. public domain in 2026, 95 years after its first publication.

Excerpt

I have noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone and, finding you out, leaves a message begging you to call him up the moment you come in, and it's important, the matter is more often important to him than to you. When it comes to making you a present or doing you a favour most people are able to hold their impatience within reasonable bounds. So when I got back to my lodgings with just enough time to have a drink, a cigarette, and to read my paper before dressing for dinner, and was told by Miss Fellows, my landlady, that Mr. Alroy Kear wished me to ring him up at once, I felt that I could safely ignore his request.