With her customary accuracy, Jane Gardam reveals the extraordinariness of ordinary people as she deals with the pangs of love- fulfilled or hopeless, sexual or spiritual, tortured or hilarious- in these eleven stories.

Paraded here are ladies with a 'thing' about vicars, strange events happening in ornate downstairs lavatories (and in ornate upstairs ones), and the English abroad, desperate and dotty. The glum and impossible Edna haunts the supermarket- and dispenses an unlikely kiss of life. The younger sister of Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid declares her sibling 'very silly' and turns her story on its tail, an old maid forms a curious liason with a tramp, and small moments of temptation fill hotel rooms as histories glance briefly off each other.

Winner of the Katherine Mansfield Award

About the Author
Jane Gardam is the only writer to have been twice awarded the Whitbread/Costa Prize for Best Novel of the Year, for The Queen of the Tambourine and The Hollow Land. She also holds a Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime's contribution to the enjoyment of literature. She is the author of five volumes of acclaimed stories: Black Faces, White Faces (David Higham Prize and the Royal Society of Literature's Winifred Holtby Prize); The Pangs of Love (Katherine Mansfield Prize); Going into a Dark House (Silver Pen Award from PEN); Missing the Midnight; and The People on Privilege Hill. Her novels include God on the Rocks, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Faith Fox; The Flight of the Maidens; the bestselling Old Filth, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2005; The Man in the Wooden Hat; and Last Friends. Jane Gardam was born in Yorkshire. She now lives in east Kent.

Reviews
There is, in Jane Gardam's writing, the air of a magician. Each story unfolds with precision, art concealing art, and with a marvellously satisfying punch line * DAILY TELEGRAPH *
A spare and elegant master of her art * THE TIMES *
Exuberant narration and stylish dialogue; I read it with relish... powerful and haunting. * Penelope Lively, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH *
Marvellously precise sleight-of-hand short stories. * DAILY MAIL *
All the stories possess a delicacy and economy which leaves one, having read them, with just the right measure of pleasurable incompleteness * FINANCIAL TIMES *
Assured and enjoyable * STANDARD *
She does fiction as it should be done, with confidence and insight -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie * Observer *



Book Information
ISBN 9780349114040
Author Jane Gardam
Format Paperback
Page Count 160
Imprint Abacus
Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
Dimensions(mm) 203mm * 127mm * 9mm