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What to expect

The short stories of Saki - the intriguing pen name of Hector Hugh Munro - are among the wittiest in the language. Dark satires of Edwardian society, populated by decadent dandies, wild beasts and cunning children, they are the source of the most playfully wicked currents in the English comic imagination, inspiring figures from P. G. Wodehouse to Roald Dahl, Noël Coward to The League of Gentlemen.

But Saki is among the most mysterious and contradictory characters in literary history: conservative campaigner, courageous soldier, pioneer of the camp sensibility, and a pagan lord of misrule. Leaving almost no letters or papers, he had an uncanny ability to disappear.

In the first biography of Saki for nearly half a century, Oliver Soden follows the tracks of this rare beast, discovering much startling new material. This is a book as witty and adventurous as its subject, roaming from Edwardian drawing rooms to the Burmese jungle, from revolutionary Russia to the killing fields of the Somme. Saki is revealed as never before, in all his outrageous brilliance.

Critics Review

The mystery of Saki unravelled. A quite extraordinary story, quite beautifully told
GYLES BRANDRETH
Oliver Soden's gorgeous study of Saki is a resurrection of an exquisite extinct animal, brought back to life in flash-lit scenes. Far more exciting than mere biography, it reclaims, darkly and in beautiful prose, a fascinating figure of queer literature whose transformative stories stand as a slyly subliminal alternative history - a vivid and elegant record of a lost world
PHILIP HOARE
Wise, witty and wry - the biography that Saki, and all devoted Sakiphants, deserve
BEN SCHOTT
Author Oliver Soden
Narrator Oliver Soden
Duration 9 hours
Release Date
ISBN 9781399625890
Format Audiobook
Publisher Orion
Genre Biography: writers, First World War
Availability AU, GB, IE

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