CAESAR'S WIFE, Somerset Maugham, A Novelized Rendition

Desire is easy. Duty is the dance. Cairo, just after the Great War: where Islamic arches frame English chintz, rumor moves faster than the Nile, and a brilliant diplomat’s young bride discovers that love is only part of the bargain. Violet Little has married Sir Arthur, the Foreign Office’s lion in Egypt. She also cannot quite silence her heart for one man she must never love—Arthur’s gifted protégé. A confession in a shuttered room, a waltz beneath colored lanterns, an assassination whispered into being: as politics and passion entwine, Violet and Arthur are forced to decide what it means to be “above suspicion” when the cost is paid in sleepless nights rather than scandal. He will trust her freedom. She will test her courage. And a city that thrives on spectacle will learn the quiet heroism of lives held together by choice. Faithful to the wit and architecture of W. Somerset Maugham’s stage comedy yet expanded with intimate interiority and lush scene-painting, Caesar’s Wife becomes a modern, highly readable novel of moral suspense—about the kinds of love that do not make headlines, the loyalties that outlast longing, and the moment when doing right stops sounding cold and starts making the heart go quiet. On one glittering night, a single decision will tell them who they are.