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  • Published: 5 August 2004
  • ISBN: 9780141906812
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

The Shooting Party




A masterpiece of historical fiction, and the inspiration behind Downton Abbey

When a young woman dies during a shooting party at the country estate of a dissolute count, a magistrate is called upon to investigate. The mystery deepens and suspicion falls more widely as it emerges that the dead woman was at the centre of a tangled web of relationships: with her elderly husband, with the lecherous count, and with the magistrate himself...

  • Published: 5 August 2004
  • ISBN: 9780141906812
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

Other books in the series

Russian Thinkers
The New Penguin Book Of American Short Stories, From Washington Irving To Lydia Davis
When You Are Old
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
The Good Soldier
Selected Poetry
Man and Superman
Military Dispatches
The Prelude

About the author

Anton Chekhov

ANTON CHEKHOV (1860–1904) is regarded as one of the world’s masters of the short story. The son of a hapless shopkeeper and grandson of a former serf, Chekhov began at the age of twenty to support his family through the publication of magazine pieces. The writing of these short works—many of which were collected in English for the first time in Seven Stories’ Undiscovered Chekhov and Little Apples—served as the author’s apprenticeship in literature, which was undertaken simultaneously with his studies to become a doctor. Both of these educations would leave their mark on the rising author. By the 1890s Chekhov had moved on to weightier journals, and he had drifted away from the practice of medicine; but his work would always be characterized by the copywriter’s vividness and the sober exactitude of a scientist. In an age of literary aristocrats, Chekhov did as much as any modern writer to democratize the profession. He used his talent to examine the lives of street urchins, déclassé provincials and frustrated reformers. By the time of his death from tuberculosis in 1904, all Russia and much of the world had taken heed of his credo: “For chemists there is nothing unclean on the earth. The writer must be as objective as the chemist.”

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