Author:Thomas Hardy,Susan Hill
The darkly passionate short stories of Thomas Hardy are compelling explorations of love, social class, superstition and legend. This collection contains many of his finest and most representative, and includes 'The Withered Arm', an eerie depiction of arcane witchcraft in nineteenth-century England; 'Barbara of the House of Grebe', in which a beautiful man's tragic disfigurement by fire is savagely exploited by his rival; 'The Son's Veto', showing the cruelty of an educated youth towards his ignorant but tender mother; and 'The Distracted Preacher', the story of one man's conflict between heartfelt love and his own sense of moral and civic duty. By turns moving and poetic, and surprisingly modern and brutally macabre, these eloquent tales may be numbered among the greatest creations of Hardy's genius.
This woman is a profound writer
—— Richard FordKennedy has now proved that she is one of the few young writers to have found a distinctive voice, one that we could recognise even from a couple of sentences; and that in itself is already a considerable achievement
—— Jonathan Coe , Mail on SundayPowerful, acute and wholly convincing
—— Sunday TimesGreat short stories are rare if not rarer than great poems and the fact that a handful here possess great magical quality is remarkable... A. L. Kennedy is a writer of original and beguiling diction
—— Alan Taylor , Scotland on SundayFunny, deadpan, angry, tender and despairing
—— ElleA profound knowledge of the cultures of Mittel-europa, of the literatures of France, the United States and Britain translated into Buenos Aires vernacular, gives Cozarinsky's narratives a fiery intellectual strength and a powerful originality
—— Alberto Manguel