The Unbearable Bassington

First published in 1912, The Unbearable Bassington stands as Saki's most substantial venture into longer fiction, and perhaps his most poignant. Known primarily for his razor-edged short stories-where wit, mischief, and a certain cool cruelty dance in quick succession-Saki (H. H. Munro) brings those same gifts to this novel, but with a deeper, darker resonance.

At the centre of the story is Comus Bassington: charming, feckless, brilliant, and disastrously ill-suited to the demands of the polite Edwardian world that surrounds him. His mother, the formidable Francesca, hopes to guide him toward a respectable life, but her ambitions collide with his temperament at every turn. What begins as social comedy gradually shades into tragedy, revealing Saki's acute understanding of human frailty-and his sense that society's expectations can crush as easily as they refine.