Author: Graham Greene

Publisher: Vintage Books

First published:1951

Setting: London, UK
Read in October 2013

My Rating ★★★★★  4.5

My Waterstones Review

“A classic that can be read and reread”

If you are perusing a book shop (or the online equivalent) and are about to discard this book as poor value (it is only 160 pages long) then stop right there! If you have never read Graham Greene then you really should and this is a good place to start, and once read it is highly likely that you will reach for a second of his, and a third.

This book is about obsession and jealousy, love and hate, it has comic turns and sadness. But consider this, it has parallels with Graham Greene’s suspected own affair, and it has spawned two films and an opera.

Book Review

On a wet January evening in 1946 Maurice Bendrix, an author, has a chance meeting with Henry Miles a senior civil servant with the Ministry of Pensions and later Home Security. He hates Henry, and his wife Sarah, despite a tempestuous affair which started two years earlier and was suddenly ended by Sarah. But Henry has a problem and is looking for a friend, he suspects Sarah of having an affair.

There are parallels here between Graham and his affair with Lady Catherine Walston. It is a short story, just 160 pages long, of obsession and jealousy, love and hate, and Catholicism. It spawned two films (1955 and 1999) and an opera. But the depth of love was unknown until 2008 when two small volumes of love poems, After Two Years, and For Christmas, were put up for sale, six poems written in Graham Greene’s own hand. Telegraph article by Chris Hastings