If all else perish, there will remain a storyteller's world...that is exclusively and forever Maugham, a world of verandah and prahu which we enter as well as we do that of Conan Doyle's Baker Street, and with a happy and eternal homecoming

Maugham teases out buried secrets as mesmerising as the heat and as menacing as the surrounding jungle

Ideally you should listen to these stories lying in a long cane chair on the veranda of a dark bungalow sipping a gin and bitters - not that Maugham's writing needs any further atmospheric embellishment. Like Kipling and Conrad, Maugham transports us to a long-since-vanished and distinctly non-PC world of hard-drinking colonial planters and traders and their frosty memsahibs

In clean, uncomplicated prose inlaid with images of striking lyricism, Woodward explores the bizarre possibilities of ordinary people's lives

The down-to-earth dialogue and the deadpan delivery remain doggedly realistic, and some stories retain not only the ring of truth but also its open-ended structure

Uncanny, absurd and at times macabre, these stories magically combine a poet's eye for imagery with a novelist's complexity of theme

The author's humour often glimmers quietly and there is surreal black comedy

pungent and memorable

An enjoyable collection.

Gerard Woodward falls squarely between the comic lunacy of American short-form virtuoso George Saunders and the everyday rhapsodies of Raymond Carver ... Woodward is actually at his best when he's knee-deep in the ordinary

At last, Galloway's stories are back in print in one collection...savagely accurate, engaging and funny, she is one of our great contemporary writers

A testament to the sharp eye and shrewd brain of Janice Galloway, one of Scotland's finest writers

A writer of passion and virtuosity