The Stories | 
Look what I found today, @Centique , and right after your glowing review! I also found another Beryl Bainbridge, @Cathythoughts . 👏
Just doing my best to support my local secondhand bookshop on #IndependentBookstoreDay , of course. 😉
pickI‘m kicking myself because i had almost finished this book and then the library insisted i bring it back 😂 But it was probably the best collection of short stories I‘ve ever read! That is - if you like authors like Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, maybe Penelope Lively. These are frequently bittersweet stories where the main character is a woman, often an older woman, and they focus on love and grief and ageing and mistakes and chances lost and ⬇️
My #top10ofthedecade #fictionedition - these being favorite books that I've actually read which were published in the past ten years. (Really 12 because I cheat and like grids to be balanced🤷🏻♀️)
Gardam is one of my favorite authors, and this is a fantastic collection. On sale today in US ebook stores.
Seriously, she's brilliant.
Jane Gardam has the kind of gift for description that one rarely encounters in an author, the ability to draw a compelling character in just a few lines. @Aimeesue will agree on this point!
From "The Pangs of Love" a witty take on the aftermath of the HC Andersen The Little Mermaid tale. This is not a typical subject of Gardam's writing, which mostly centers on older people and their emotional lives, which sounds boring, but honestly isn't. She's very Austen-like in a lot of ways, and The Sidwell Letters is one of the best short stories I've ever read.
And she's very, very funny.
