In stories of astonishing compression and insight, Mavis Gallant wrote of characters severed from their home, exiles disconnected from each other and from themselves. Tracing the fault lines of the post-war world in the intimate lives of her characters, she could conjure an entire worldview in a telling gesture or passing comment. This new volume, selected and introduced by Tessa Hadley, collects the finest work from across Gallant's career. Here are stories of young men returning from wartime internment to changed families, snobbish social climbers haunted by the words of their downtrodden colleagues, and children peering through glass at the secrets and infidelities of their parents. Complex, moving and painfully true, they secure her position among the world's great short story writers.

"The literary sensation of 2025... the exquisite stories she left behind place her among the greats" - Telegraph

"Luminescent, subtle and lasting. Gallant's chronicles of internal and external exile are a fitting tribute to a diasporic century" - Guardian

"One of the most brilliant story writers in the language, who deserves to be read as widely as her fellow Canadian Alice Munro. No one writes about brutish people like Gallant; she transforms the meanest human specimens into subjects of high fascination and sympathy" - New Yorker

"Line by line, word by word, no one writes with more compression than Gallant. Great short stories are sometimes said to be as rich and as full as novels, but hers are as rich and full as encyclopedias" - Harper's

"Compulsively readable and deeply memorable... Inimitable" - Guardian