England's Golden Afternoon

Synopsis

Saki (Hector Hugo Munroe) is perhaps the most graceful spokesman for England's "golden afternoon" - the slow and peaceful years before World War I. This volume contains the whole of Saki's work - all the short stories, his three novels and three plays.

About the author

H.H. Munro, also known by his pseudonym Saki (1870-1916), was a prolific Scottish author of the Edwardian era. He wrote The Chronicles of Clovis, When William Came: A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns, and Complete Stories and Novels Of Saki. At age 44, Munro volunteered as a soldier during World War I, enlisting in the 22nd Battalion, Royal Fusiliers. He wrote a number of short stories from the trenches.

From the back cover

Macabre, acid and very funny, Saki's work drives a knife into the upper crust of English Edwardian life. Here are the effete and dashing heroes, Reginald, Clovis and Comus Bassington, and tea on the lawn with the articulate duchesses, the smell of gunshot and the tinkle of the caviar fork, and here is the half-seen, half-felt menace of disturbing undercurrents . . . all in this magnificent omnibus edition.

Like Wilde and Wodehouse, Saki knew his way round the clubs  and country houses of the upper classes, whose absurdities and hypocrisies he exposed with razor-toothed wit ... One is delighted to discover a writer with a vision of humanity shot through with a pessimism as bleak as that of  Swift, Céline, Bernhard, Kingsley Amis' - Patrick McGrath in the Independent.