Larry Darrell, haunted by the horrors of the war, abandons his easy life and glowing prospects for an odyssey that takes him from the trenches of World War I to the Paris of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, then on to a monastery in the Tibetan mountains. The progress of his spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brilliant characters - his fiancEe Isabel whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong repercussions, and Elliott Templeton, her uncle, a classic expatriate American snob. Maugham himself wanders in and out of the story, to observe his characters struggling with their fates.