The Other Garden and Collected Stories by Francis Wyndham

Francis Wyndham’s oeuvre encompasses only a novella and two volumes of short stories: yet if this collected edition runs to so few words it is due to his admirable refusal to waste any of them. These are gently comedic stories of inaction, reflecting the author’s experience of being invalided from the army during the second world war, mostly set in sleepy Cotswold market towns with an Austen-esque sense of greater events unfolding elsewhere (though as Alan Hollinghurst points out in his excellent introduction: “Like the society of Emma this one is a good deal more amusing to read about than it would be to live among”).

Review: The Other Garden and Collected Stories | Books | The Guardian.