Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories

Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by Ilya Repin, Vasily Polenov and Ivan Shishkin. Stories from a man who traveled where he wrote: a Spanish beggar boy who inherits, a Russian border, a Corsican vendetta, an English country house with a secret. Merriman was Hugh Stowell Scott, a Lloyd's underwriter who used a pen name so the City would not learn he wrote novels, and died at forty-one. His short work is tighter than his novels and half-forgotten. Sixty plates of sea light, village streets and roadside beggars by painters including Edvard Munch and Ilya Repin carry the same wandering, hard-luck Europe these stories walk through.