Cruelty

'Cruelty has a human heart ...' Even when we mean to be kind we can sometimes be cruel. We each have a streak of nastiness inside us. A wife pawns her lover's parting gift with unexpected consequences, an unusual painting proves to be more valuable than anyone, especially its owner, could ever have predicted, a husband and wife, unable to get their new baby to feed, hit upon a disturbing solution . . . Cruelty highlights a domestic familiarity always on the edge of something much, much darker. In these ten tales of cruelty master storyteller Roald Dahl explores how and why it is we make others suffer. Collected together for the first time, stories include The Butler, The Great Automatic Grammatizator, Royal Jelly, Mrs Bixby and the Colonel's Coat, The Swan, Poison, Skin, The Princess and the Poacher, Genesis and Catastrophe and Mr Feasey. Dahl understood our deepest secrets, desires and fears and Cruelty is one of four books - the rest being Lust, Deception and Madness - that explore our hidden selves. ‘He finds the child in the adult and the adult in the child and, with a little smile, he sticks the knife in both’ – Anthony Horowitz