Books by Saki

The death of Oscar Wilde in 1900 left the position of The Wittiest Man in the World open and up for grabs. There seemed no clear inheritor. Then, over the next couple of years, in the pages of the Westminster Gazette, there slowly emerged someone whose political satires and sketches of society brought the Wildean barb screaming into the new century. He was a man by the name of Hector Munro, but very few knew that. All his pieces were signed with a name now synonymous with wit - simply Saki. - "Youth should suggest innocence." "But never act on the suggestion." - "Scandal is merely the compassionate allowance which the gay make to the humdrum." Saki's savage sketches of society were initially centred around one character, uncannily like himself. Reginald is dangerous. Brutally honest, not interested in mediocrity or convention, he cuts a hilarious swathe through more polite circles. These 15 pieces were first collected together in 1904. - "Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent." - "The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other." - "I hate posterity - it's so fond of having the last word." Saki (Hector Munro) was born in Burma in 1870. He was sent to boarding school in Devon and Bedfordshire. Following his father into the Imperial Police, he was posted back to Burma. After contracting malaria, he returned to England where his writing career blossomed. When war broke out in 1914, he refused a commission and joined up as an ordinary trooper. During the Battle of the Ancre in 1916, whilst resting in a crater, he was shot by a German sniper. His output included some of the funniest stories in the English language, as well as plays, essays and two novels.

Fate had done her good service in providing her with Henry for a brother, but Francesca could well set the plaguy malice of the destiny that had given her Comus for a son. The boy was one of those untamable young lords of misrule . . . he was irresponsible and ungrateful -- the focus of his corner of British society. And what could be done with him. . . ? Send him off to the colonies, was what.

The buttoned-up world of the British upper classes is exploded by the brilliance, wit and audacity of Saki's bomb-like stories. In 'The Unrest Cure' the ordered home of a respectable country gent is rocked to its core. For punchlines, twists, satire and pure mirth, Saki's stories are second-to-none.

A collection of eighteen deliciously disturbing tales by Saki, the Edwardian master of the short story. Saki's sharp satire pierces the polite veneer of country house parties, hunting meets and evenings round the pianola. Wild beasts stampede through the drawing room, servants suffer murderous delusions and sinister children plot revenge on their elders. These witty, macabre and sometimes bizarre stories cut through the social conventions of the Edwardian upper classes. 'Saki is like a perfect martini but with absinthe stirred in . . . heady, delicious and dangerous.' - Stephen Fry 'Saki is among those few writers, inspirational when read at an early age, who definitely retain their magic when revisited decades later.' - Christopher Hitchens 'These delicious, hilarious and yet surgical satires are amongst the finest short stories in the English language.' - Alexei Sayle 'I took it up to my bedroom, opened it casually and was unable to go to sleep until I had finished it.' - Noel Coward

Saki is perhaps the most graceful spokesman for England's 'Golden Afternoon' - the slow and peaceful years before the First World War. Although, like so many of his generation, he died tragically young, in action on the Western Front, his reputation as a writer continued to grow long after his death. The stories are humorous, satiric, supernatural, and macabre, highly individual, full of eccentric wit and unconventional situations. With his great gift as a social satirist of his contemporaryupper-class Edwardian world, Saki is one of the few undisputed English masters of the short story.