Catalina

Description

Crippled and disconsolate, sixteen-year-old Catalina is the one person unable to join in the festivities of the Feast of the Assumption. Yet that is when she miraculously meets and talks with the Blessed Virgin as though she were her own mother. But in the dark days of the Spanish Inquisition, the Church is apt to take a serious view of such an ostentatious claim. The last of Maugham's novels, Catalina is a romantic celebration of Spain and a delightfully mischievous satire on absolutism.

William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 and lived in Paris until he was ten. He was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University. He spent some time at St. Thomas' Hospital with the idea of practising medicine, but the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897, won him over to literature. Of Human Bondage, the first of his masterpieces, came out in 1915, and with the publication in 1919 of The Moon and Sixpence his reputation as a novelist was established. At the same time his fame as a successful playwright and writer was being consolidated with acclaimed productions of various plays and the publication of several short story collections. His other works include travel books, essays, criticism and the autobiographical The Summing Up and A Writer's Notebook. In 1927 Somerset Maugham settled in the South of France and lived there until his death in 1965

"One of my favourite writers" -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez "The modern writer who has influenced me the most" -- George Orwell "In his prime, he evolved a clear and effective prose style that achieved a quality possessed only by master story-tellers, making the reader greedy for more...From an era that produced George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy, Maugham is the great survivor" Economist