Mrs Bridge (1959) is an inspired novel set in the years around World War II that testifies to the sapping ennui of an unexamined suburban life (in Kansas City, in this case). India Bridge, the eponymous character, has three children and a meticulous workaholic lawyer husband. She defends her dainty, untouched guest towels from son Douglas, who has

Traffics and Discoveries (1904) is a collection of short stories, mostly South African or technological in emphasis, and with accompanying poems. ‘The Captive’, ‘A Sahib’s War’, and ‘The Comprehensions of Private Copper’ reproduce the flavour of Kipling’s early stories about the lower ranks in the context of the Boer War. The same knowing narrator who recorded

Staying On (1977) is about post colonial India. Tusker and Lily Smalley stayed on in India. Given the chance to return ‘home’ when Tusker, once a Colonel in the British Army, retired, they chose instead to remain in the small hill town of Pangkot, with its eccentric inhabitants and archaic rituals left over from the

After a chance encounter on a train the English teacher William Bradshaw starts a close friendship with the mildly sinister Arthur Norris. Norris is a man of contradictions; lavish but heavily in debt, excessively polite but sexually deviant. First published in 1935  Mr Norris Changes Trains piquantly evokes the atmosphere of Berlin during the rise