The Explorer

Lucy Allerton watches her family come apart. Hamlyn’s Purlieu, the house the Allertons held for three hundred years, is sold to cover her father’s debts, and Fred Allerton then draws seven years for fraud. When Alec MacKenzie, a Scottish explorer bent on breaking the Arab slave trade in British East Africa, asks her to marry him, she refuses and asks something harder: that he take her younger brother George on the next expedition, so the boy can make the name clean again. What George does up-country, and the promise Alec makes him there, leave Alec unable to answer when a dismissed subordinate takes his own version to the London papers. Maugham built the book from a play written years earlier, and his lasting subject is already here, the gap between a man’s reputation and what he will not say.