Selected Stories

First Published in 1957 by Penguin Books.

This book contains a selection of stories which illustrate the world of ordinary people in the country, village, or provincial town; a world actuated by love, fear, jealousy, avarice, and most other 'ordinary' emotions, and little touched by politics, social changes, or religious movements in the world at large, and whose greatest concern is with personal relationships, about which Mr Bates writes with candour and delicacy.

"His tales have, what current short-story writing of the more literary type so often lacks, a real vitality, a kind of sunlit vivacity of phrase and incident, which gives brightness to stories even of relatively sombre themes... He can mingle comedy and emotion with fine balance. He is always sensitive, often tender, and has a fine detachment in narrative and power of complete evocation in description."
The Times.

Preface
The Mill
Chateau Bougainvillaea
The Ox
Cut and Come Again
The Station
Harvest Moon
The Bridge
The Kimono
The Beauty of the Dead
The Loved One
I Am Not Myself
The Earth
Love is not Love
A German Idyll
Mr Penfold
Breeze Anstey

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