Liza of Lambeth

[Read by David Ian Davies]

From one of the twentieth century's greatest literary minds comes a novel of the working class.

Liza of Lambeth, W. Somerset Maugham's first novel, offers insight into the everyday lives of working class Londoners at the turn of the twentieth century. Liza Kemp is an eighteen-year-old girl working in a factory in the Lambeth slum along London's Vere Street. As Liza enters into a misguided affair with an older, married man, Jim Blakeston, the novel reveals the tragedies and abuses suffered by those living in poverty. A mood of subdued acceptance of one's life conditions prevails in this novel, which sparked the literary career of one of England's most successful authors of the twentieth century.