I was a teenager when I first started reading William Somerset Maugham’s short stories, probably an odd choice for one so young, as the stories were written in the early decades of the last century.
But I was a kid from a small town in country Victoria, and they sparked my imagination; Maugham’s characters caught pearling luggers from Thursday Island, across the Arafura Sea to Papua New Guinea; traversed slowly flowing rivers through steamy jungles, and stayed in remote former outposts of the British Empire in Malaysia.
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