To quickly link to a Bates book for more details, use the list below:
The Wild Cherry Tree
First Published in 1968 by Michael Joseph Ltd.
In each of these ten stories H.E. Bates evokes places and defines a life you could never before have imagined. A pig farmer's wife secretly builds up a 'rich, expensive and dazzling' wardrobe to esacpe the filthy squalor of her life; a hypocritical do-gooder is driven to more than distraction by two Jaguar belt sirens; a woman wearing odd stockings gets involved with a man who reads his newspaper upside down ...
The Wild Cherry Tree shows Bates at his most tense and immediate: observing with baleful accuracy just what happens when people are 'thrown suddenly with neither direction nor compass into territory utterly strange or unexplained'.
Contents:
- Halibut Jones
- The Wild Cherry Tree
- Some Other Spring
- The World Upside-Down
- How Vainly Men Themselves Amaze
- The First Day of Christmas
- The Black Magnolia
- Love Me Little, Love Me Long
- Same Time, Same Place
- The Middle of Nowhere