Jack Almond, once a rising star in the foreign office, is found dead in a Malaysian opium den. Beside him is a pile of letters charting his downfall which began when he fall in love with Lady Diana Kastellan.
Knobby and Tom are a pair of best friends in Malaya. They both get married at the same time and when the wives become best friends as well everything seems to be perfect until Knobby and Tom's wife fall in love.
Mrs. Albert Forrester, the writer of high-brow but low-selling poetry and essays, writes a bestselling mystery novel. Where did she find the inspiration and what is the secret behind her marriage to a boring businessman?
A planter's wife shoots down a family friend, claiming that he tried to rape her. But someone very close to the dead man holds a letter, in the woman's handwriting, that casts a very different light on the fatal night's events.
A young man is imprisoned for killing his wife. Was it an accident, as he claims, or was it murder?
While staying at a fat farm, Frank, Arrow, and Beatrice bond over their love of bridge. They become best friends and begin taking annual holidays to Antibes but trouble arises one year when Frank invites her effortlessly thin cousin along.
A woman leaves Japan after learning of her husband's affair. On the voyage to England, she meets a planter dying of a curse placed on him by the lover he left behind. Meanwhile, the ship's doctor is in love with a married passenger.
Lord Mountdrago, the foreign minister, humiliates a political rival in parliament for fun after which the man begins haunting his dreams. As the line between dreams and reality blurs, Mountdrago's guilt starts driving him insane.
A young woman uses her potentially fatal heart condition as a means to lead a life of luxury and indulgence.
A middle-class girl and her working-class fellow are bound by true love in defiance of the wishes of the girl's parents; then the beau is pinched when it's discovered he's been stealing to finance their Sunday outings.
Laura Clayton, a respectable American woman, marries an Italian playboy. At first, their marriage is blissful but after he returns to his old habits of drinking and gambling, Laura becomes more and more drawn towards his father.
A young up-and-coming businessman leaves for Tahiti to earn money and is never seen again. Two years later, his best friend goes after him and finds him living in squalor with the natives.
Still in proper mourning following the death of her husband, a colonial administrator, in the East, a young widow reveals to her stiff upper-class London family that her husband was no paragon but a hopeless drunkard, and that his death was not caused by a tropical fever.