Duel Duet

Graham GREENE, known for his iconic novels, also wrote extraordinary short stories. Here some of the best have been arranged into pairs - to be read as a duel or duet - by novelist and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li.

Twenty-two of Greene’s very best stories are collected here, each of them bearing the hallmark themes that characterise his great novels: innocence and vengeance, love and hate, pity and violence.

Writer and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li, has arranged the stories into pairs, to be read together in contrast or in harmony – as a duel or a duet. In doing so Li draws out the extraordinary power in Greene’s work, creating an ingenious new perspective on a writer we thought we knew. Unexpected, surprising and wide-ranging, this is the short fiction of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most adored storytellers, revealing his brilliance as never before.

‘No twentieth-century writer had a subtler mind for human comparison’ Zadie Smith

‘Greene had wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature’ John le Carré

'One of the most important British writers of the twentieth century' Daily Telegraph

‘A superb storyteller’ New York Times

‘One of the finest writers of any language’ Washington Post

‘One of our greatest authors’ Independent

SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY YIYUN LI