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  • Published: 18 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529946512
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $39.99

Duel Duet

Selected Stories





Graham Greene's best short stories, selected and introduced by the novelist and uber-fan, Yiyun Li.

Graham Greene, known for his iconic novels, also wrote exceptional short stories. Here the some of the best have been arranged into pairs - to be read as a duel or duet - by novelist and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li.

Twenty-two of Greene’s very best stories are collected here, each of them bearing the hallmark themes that characterise his great novels: innocence and vengeance, love and hate, pity and violence.

Writer and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li, has arranged the stories into pairs, to be read together in contrast or in harmony – as a duel or a duet. In doing so Li draws out the extraordinary power in Greene’s work, creating an ingenious new perspective on a writer we thought we knew. Unexpected, surprising and wide-ranging, this is the short fiction of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most adored storytellers, revealing his brilliance as never before.

'One of the most important British writers of the twentieth century' Daily Telegraph

SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY YIYUN LI

  • Published: 18 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529946512
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $39.99

About the author

Graham Greene

Graham Greene was born in 1904. He worked as a journalist and critic, and in 1940 became literary editor of the Spectator. He was later employed by the Foreign Office. As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography, two of biography and four books for children. He also wrote hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in April 1991.

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Praise for Duel Duet

Graham Greene has wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the top ranks of world literature

John le Carré

Greene was a force beyond his books... The outsider, the dissenter, the spoiled priest, the failure, the classic underdog - out of characters such as these Greene made novels and stories which have enriched hundreds of thousands of readers

Melvyn Bragg
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