It is a mark of how various are Jane Gardam’s interests that this collection of short stories does not read as a collection at all, but more as a very agreeable hotch-potch. Only place unites them, for several take place in leafy London suburbs, Hampstead, perhaps, or Wimbledon. The stories are unalike in subject, length and form: there are ghost stories, tales of quiet revenge; what might, in heavier hands, be called social commentary. Inevitably, some are better than others. Flights of fancy, jokes and telling moments spill across the pages.
If there is a common thread, it might be described as growing old disgracefully. The first four stories are about old people, and the aged turn up in other stories, but in Jane Gardam’s hands this does not mean knitting in front of daytime telly. One tale begins:
At three o’clock in the morning over a hundred miles from home in a hotel I’d never heard of before that weekend, I broke my ankle in the bathroom of the ensuite bedroom where I was spending the night with my lover.
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