“The Moon and a Penny” is a novel of big questions that art has been asking since time immemorial: what are the limits of being true to yourself and your destiny, what sacrifices can be made on the altar of beauty, where does the true life of an artist begin and end? The story of how the English stockbroker Charles Strickland abandoned home, family, work and devoted himself to painting is a novel about a grandiose dream and the unity of the sublime and the earthly, about the attainable and unattainable from the point of view of beauty, about the acceptable and unacceptable from the point of view morality. Finally, this is a novel that has sparked ongoing debate about how much the figure of the great French artist Paul Gauguin, the prototype of the main character, is reflected or distorted. “The Patterned Veil” is a love story full of tragedy, unfolding in a small town in China, where a young English bacteriologist and his wife come to fight the cholera epidemic. The book formed the basis of the Hollywood film “The Painted Veil”, in which the main roles were played by the magnificent Naomi Watts and Edward Norton.