Englishmen meeting Indians, European colonisers settling in Congo, a Russian aristocrat falling in love with an American woman, a child of English origins coming into contact with the Maoris and, finally, an American sea captain involved in the slave trade. Four short stories and a longer novella in which Kipling, Conrad, Mansfield, Fitzgerald and Melville deal with the interaction of different values and cultures. The collection is specially tailored to the needs of English learners and contains the original texts with numerous explanatory notes, introductions to the collection, to the authors and the stories, the keywords to understand the texts and several activities.