1921, British colony of Penang, Malaysia.
Robert Hamlyn is a wealthy lawyer, and Lesley, his wife, a high-society hostess. Their lives are enlivened when an old friend of Robert's arrives for a visit with his extroverted secretary.
Willie Somerset Maugham, despite being one of the best writers of his time, is going through a creative and personal crisis: he is in a marriage of convenience, his health is fragile, and he has just lost his savings in a disastrous investment. In Penang, he desperately seeks a story that will allow him to save his career, and he finds it through Leslie and her past: her friendship with a British woman accused of murdering her husband, her dealings with Sun Yat-sen, the future first president of China whose revolution ended thousands of years of imperial dynasty, and her extramarital affair with an Asian man behind the back of the rigid coloni...read more
