Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait - Mavis Gallant. In 1950, The New Yorker accepted one of Mavis Gallant's short stories for publication and she has since become the one of the most accomplished and respected short story writers of her time. Gallant is an undisputed master whose peerless prose captures the range of human experience in her sweeping portraits set in Europe in the second half of the last century. An expatriate herself, her stories deal with exile, displacement, of love and of estranged emotions, but they are never conventional. This collection of fifty-two stories, written between 1953 and 1995, is timeless, to be savoured and re-read.