The Stories - Softcover

I adored Jane Gardam's The Stories. She does fiction as it should be done, with confidence and insight. (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Observer)

She has the Austeneaque quality of being satisfying and disquieting, conventional and experimental . . . conversational, lucid, realist yet fantastical, she can be outrageously funny, gradually revealing her characters by what is not said, and not seen . . . one of our greatest living writers (Amanda Craig Independent on Sunday)

It is good, too, to be reminded that Gardam is as brilliant a short story writer as she is a novelist . . . Gardam, like Penelope Fitzgerald, knows the supreme art of what and exactly how much to leave out . . . this is a deeply, impeccably humane and pleasurable book (Neel Mukherjee Independent)

Beautifully formed short stories . . . Gardam writes with wit, harnessing an expert use of dialogue to bring her characters to life . . . written by arguably one of our greatest living writers, the moments depicted in The Stories will certainly resonate long after the last page has been turned (Daily Express)

Gardam's narratives are sharp and disconcerting . . . intimate and confiding . . . a compelling mixture of the strange and the familiar - well-told tales in which love, death and sorrow are properly valued. These moving and diverting meditations on the past offer a simple lesson: they don't make them like that any more. This collection is very welcome. (Sunday Times)

Pure delight (The Times)

Each one of these narratives - none of them afraid of looking into the great terrifying secrets of love and grief, death, ageing and faith in a mere handful of pages - make the heart race. Sly, sharp and mischievous . . . It is Gardam's gift for the ecstatic, for showing us what a place of wonders is the world and the hearts that dwell in it, that endows this collection with a dangerous and formidable energy. She gives us miracle heaped upon miracle (Christobel Kent Guardian)

There is little Gardam doesn't know about being in love, or any of the other vicissitudes of ordinary life . . . her funniness does not cease to sparkle, but she moves as surely as she entertains (Telegraph)

It is Jane Gardam's particular gift to be able to shine a light through these unexpected peepholes, straight into the human heart . . . marvellous (Spectator)

Gardam's dialogue is a constant delight . . . Every character, however silent or minor, is accorded proper attention . . . Gardam's huge and firmly controlled imagination makes everything possible, everything credible . . . Of all the glories, here, 'Telegony' is the most compelling and it demonstrates Gardam's range of genius, with powerful characters, wit, doom, detailed settings and astonishing outcomes (Literary Review)

'Sly, sharp and mischievous, in these stories Gardam chooses precisely society's quietest and most overlooked characters - the old and shy and sheepish, conservative wives, stay-at-home mothers and impoverished ex-colonials, dwellers in cottages and suburban villas - to explore the fiercest passions. She has an extraordinary ability to enter the interior of the long-lived mind and to illuminate history through it; she is particularly fine on that strain of Englishness trained to repress and conceal emotion, and she entitles the most marginal of figures to love, and to beauty.

'It is Gardam's gift for the ecstatic, for showing us what a place of wonders is the world and the hearts that dwell in it, that endows this collection with a dangerous and formidable energy, richer and more concentrated than any novel. She gives us miracle heaped upon miracle' Christobel Kent, Guardian

'A deeply, impeccably humane and pleasurable book' Independent

'Pure delight' The Times