From the slipcover: In this, her fourth collection of short stories, Elspeth Davie, winner of the Katherine Mansfield Prize in 1978, writes with all her customary poise and assurance, and startles with the intensity of her vision. With a glance, sometimes oblique, sometimes direct, she looks at everyday experiences- a train journey, a presentation, a hospital visit- yet manages to invest them with an extraordinary significance, so that we are frequently tripped into realizing how fragile is our grasp of reality.
These stories have been sculpted with the unfailing control of language for which Elspeth Davie is rightly renowned. While many of them are concerned with disillusionment and loneliness, others are pierced through with shafts of wit and humour. In all of them, exposed as we are to the author's cool eye, we cannot fail, however uncomfortably, to recognize a part of ourselves.
These stories have been sculpted with the unfailing control of language for which Elspeth Davie is rightly renowned. While many of them are concerned with disillusionment and loneliness, others are pierced through with shafts of wit and humour. In all of them, exposed as we are to the author's cool eye, we cannot fail, however uncomfortably, to recognize a part of ourselves.
