The Story Archive

The Heart of the Matter

Graham Greene · 1948 CE · Novel · English · Contemporary

Scobie has served fifteen years as a police officer in a West African colony, is passed over for commissioner, and borrows from a Syrian trader to send his disappointed wife to South Africa. In her absence he takes charge of a young widow brought ashore from a torpedoed ship, and pity, the one demand he has never learned to refuse, closes around him. Greene set it in the Freetown he had worked in for the secret service, and came to resent the book's success.

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