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Where to start with Graham Greene’s books

Journey Without Maps

Graham Greene's incredible journey to an unchartered land.

One of the best travel books this century

No one who reads this book will question the value of Greene's experiment, or emerge unshaken by the penetration, the richness, the integrity of this moving record

His originality lay in his gifts as a traveller. He had the foreign ear and eye for the strangeness of ordinary life and its ordinary crises

Journey Without Maps and The Lawless Roads reveal Greene's ravening spiritual hunger, a desperate need to touch rock bottom both within the self and in the humanly created world

The iconic writer's travel log from the uncharted shores of West Africa. 
 
Leaving Europe for the first time in his life, Graham Greene set out in 1935 to discover Liberia, then a virtually unmapped republic on the shores of West Africa. This captivating account of his arduous 350-mile journey on foot - a great adventure which took him from the border with Sierra Leone to the Atlantic coast at Grand Bassa - is as much a record of one young man's self-discovery as it is a striking insight into one of the few areas of Africa untouched by Western colonisation. Journey Without Maps is regarded as a masterclass in travel writing. 
 
WITH A FOREWORD BY TIM BUTCHER AND AN INTRODUCTION BY PAUL THEROUX 
 
'One of the best travel books this century' Independent

England Made Me

A powerful and unusual love story set in a world that has lost the comfort of national identity and individualism, told by one of the 20th century’s greatest writers.

Greene can never be less than wonderfully readable.

Graham Greene was born in 1904. He worked as a journalist and critic, and in 1940 became literary editor of the Spectator. He was later employed by the Foreign Office. As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography, two of biography and four books for children. He also wrote hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in April 1991.

Set in a world that has lost the comfort of national identity and individualism, this is a powerful and unusual love story told by one of the 20th century's greatest writers. 
 
Anthony Farrant is back home after lying and cheating his way through one job after another in the Far East. When his adoring sister Kate sets him up with a role in Stockholm as bodyguard to her boss and lover, megalomaniac financier Krogh, Anthony seems set on a path to redemption. But when he receives orders from Krogh that offend his own sense of decency, he begins to leak information to a down-at-heel journalist: a decision that will cost Anthony much more than just his job. 
 
First published in 1935, England Made Me is an early Greene novel and helped to cement his reputation as an important and exciting new writing talent. 
 
'Graham Greene has wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the top ranks of world literature' John le Carré

Twenty-One Stories

A celebrated collection of stories from one of the most important British writers of the twentieth century. Features Greene's most famous short story, 'The Destructors'

One of the most important British writers of the twentieth century

Greene was a force beyond his books... The outsider, the dissenter, the spoiled priest, the failure, the classic underdog - out of characters such as these Greene made novels and stories which have enriched hundreds of thousands of readers

A celebrated collection of stories from one of the most important British writers of the twentieth century. Features Greene's most famous short story, 'The Destructors'. 
 
Written between 1929 and 1954, each of these stories bears the hallmark themes that characterise Greene's great novels: betrayal and vengeance, love and hate, pity and violence. 
 
Opening with the iconic story 'The Destructors', in which a gang of schoolboys destroys a house that has survived the Blitz, Greene offers us deliciously satisfying glimpses into twenty-one worlds, with each piece written as masterfully as his novels. From the chilling climax of a children's birthday party, to a man whose youthful indiscretions come back to haunt him, these are the unmistakable work of one of the twentieth century's greatest and most adored storytellers.

The Honorary Consul

A gripping tragicomedy of a bungled kidnapping in a provincial Argentinean town, considered to be one of Greene's finest novels.

Perhaps the most enduring novel that even he has give us

The tension never relaxes and one reads hungrily from page to page, dreading the moment it will end

Greene's work attempts to link the serious moral imagination with the spirit of adventure and romance and to extend the remapping of imaginative geography first undertaken by Conrad

A superb storyteller with a gift for provoking controversy

Greene had the sharpest eyes for trouble, the finest nose for human weaknesses, and was pitilessly honest in his observations... For experience of a whole century he was the man within

A gripping tragicomedy of a bungled kidnapping in a provincial Argentinean town, considered to be one of Greene's finest novels. 
 
In a provincial Argentinian community, Charley Fortnum - a British consul with dubious authority and a notorious fondness for drink - is kidnapped by rebels in a case of mistaken identity. The young but world-weary Doctor Eduardo Plarr, is left to pick up the pieces and secure Fortnum's release, wading through a sea of incompetence and unearthing corruption among authorities and revolutionaries in the process. 
 
First published in 1973, The Honorary Consul was one of Greene's own favourites of his works and is regarded amongst his finest novels, with Plarr perhaps the most moving and convincing figure in his fiction. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE 
 
'Perhaps the most enduring novel that even he has given us' Daily Mail

The Tenth Man

‘A masterpiece – tapped out in the lean, sharp prose that film work taught Greene to perfect’ – Sunday Times

Greene was a past master of the psychological thriller and this was no exception

A masterpiece - tapped out in the lean, sharp prose that film work taught Greene to perfect

All of the Greene hallmarks are there: pace, ingenuity, a sense of profundities suggested but never insisted upon

Typically full of psychological obsession and tricks of perspective, this short story plays games with the concepts of identity and freedom. Threaded through with paranoiac attempts to be sure of time, life, and death, the story ends with impenetrable paradox; with a tragedy and a travesty, a revenge and a redressal, truth and the ultimate lie

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR 
 
In a prison in Occupied France during the Second World War, the order is given that every tenth inmate is to be executed. Louis Chavel, a rich lawyer, draws the short straw and barters everything he owns to exchange places with another man and survive. Destitute but free, Chavel later returns to the house that he sold for his life, where he must face the consequences of his cowardice and seek redemption.

A Gun for Sale

The forerunner in its tone and themes to Greene's masterpiece Brighton Rock, A Gun for Sale is a noir thriller shot through with violence, betrayal and tormented souls. With an introduction by Robert Macfarlane.

Graham Greene taught us to understand the social and economic cripples in our midst. He taught us to look at each other with new eyes. I don't suppose his influence will ever disappear

A masterly storyteller... An enormously popular writer who was also one of the most significant novelists of his time

Graham Greene had wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature

Raven is a ruthless assassin, a hired killer, whose cold-blooded murder of the Minister for War will have violent repercussions across Europe. As the nation prepares for battle, Raven goes on the run, hunted by the police and in search of the man who paid him in stolen banknotes, eventually unearthing the terrible truth behind his deadly assignment.

Graham Greene

Yiyun Li

Graham Greene has wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the top ranks of world literature

Selected Stories

Graham Greene, known for his iconic novels, also wrote exceptional short stories. Here the some of the best have been arranged into pairs - to be read as a duel or duet - by novelist and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li. 
 
Twenty-two of Greene’s very best stories are collected here, each of them bearing the hallmark themes that characterise his great novels: innocence and vengeance, love and hate, pity and violence. 
 
Writer and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li, has arranged the stories into pairs, to be read together in contrast or in harmony – as a duel or a duet. In doing so Li draws out the extraordinary power in Greene’s work, creating an ingenious new perspective on a writer we thought we knew. Unexpected, surprising and wide-ranging, this is the short fiction of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most adored storytellers, revealing his brilliance as never before. 
 
'One of the most important British writers of the twentieth century' Daily Telegraph 
 
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY YIYUN LI

Duel Duet

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Graham Greene

Praise for Duel Duet

Graham Greene has wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the top ranks of world literature

Greene was a force beyond his books... The outsider, the dissenter, the spoiled priest, the failure, the classic underdog - out of characters such as these Greene made novels and stories which have enriched hundreds ...

Books by Graham Greene

Series by Graham Greene

Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics169 Books

The Little Train1 Book

Articles featuring Graham Greene

Classic books all teens should own

The greatest spy thrillers in literature

Where to start with Graham Greene’s books

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