# Paperback: 320 pages
# Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage International ed edition (December 5, 2000)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0375725024
# ISBN-13: 978-0375725029
Cakes are what aled me, as now ale is what cakes my memory like mud, dry and pale in the looking-glass that’s half-full and looking back to see if anyone’s looking back to look me full in the face. Whilst this is occurring, the book’s pages turn back to their humble beginnings. They’re shy (that is to say, discreet, that is to say, English) and poor (that is to say, not well-to-do, that is to say, not American) and make ends meet up with each other inevitably, by design, as the author’s hand is the mirror-image of mine. We write together–matching sentence for sentence, word for word, letter for letter–pausing every now and then to look back over our shoulders to see if anyone’s looking at us–a reader, perhaps, or maybe even two, who look just like each other and just like us, or I presume they do. I can’t tell for certain as their heads are turned away from us, turned over their shoulders, looking back, at you[underlined}. Views are full of such views.
Synopsis
Cakes and Ale is a delicious satire of London literary society between the Wars. Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by Edward Driffield’s wife to pen the official biography of her lionized novelist husband, and determined to write a bestseller. But then Kear discovers the great novelist’s voluptuous muse (and unlikely first wife), Rosie. The lively, loving heroine once gave Driffield enough material to last a lifetime, but now her memory casts an embarrassing shadow over his career and respectable image. Wise, witty, deeply satisfying, Cakes and Ale is Maugham at his best.
About the Author
W. Somerset Maugham lived in France and England. He died in 1965.