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'In our town, if you cough in the High Street the chemist up at the Town Hall has got the bottle of cough mixture wrapped up and waiting for you.' And nobody in the town provides such a wealth of delicious gossip as 'Noisy' Brackett and his wife Sally. Refusing to pay her bills, chasing her errant husband around the countryside in fast cars, setting fire to the heart of Bob, the local baker, Sally is a gloriously raffish figure of fun. In these three linked novellas Bob relates how Sally finally paid his account, how Noisy got off a motoring charge by sneezing, stole a case of stuffed...

The Camberwell Beauty is a collection of short stories which explore the close-knit world of antique dealers, their obsessions and suspicions, their hatred of customers and the fantasy lives that grow out of the objects they collect.

The Lady from Guatemala tells of a celebrated progressive who is haunted in private by an embarrassing admirer, one of the down trodden for whom he has spoken so eloquently in public. Other characters to be met in these stories are Molly, "as noisy as a blowlamp, but pretty," a women who needs two husbands at a time; an innocent young Englishman...

First published in 1989, here is England's leading man of letters-as old as the century-at the height of his powers, the incomparable V. S. Pritchett, whose brilliantly observed short stories have become classics in his own lifetime. In these six beautifully crafted stories-his latest effort-we see a master at work, casting his eye over the subjects he knows best, the ordinary men and women of England: studious fourteen- year-old Sarah, whose life is changed by a game of hide-and-seek; or Lionel Frazier, the hairdresser, who looks at a woman and sees only her head; or George Andrews, the...

'A gentle giant', as the Goncourts called him, Turgenev emerged from the barbarous yet doting rules of a terrible mother, whose cruelties to her serfs are at the heart of his hatred of serfdom. He was saturated in femininity and could not write unless he was in love. When he freed himself from his mother, he became enslaved by the famous Spanish singer, Pauline Viardot, married to a Frenchman. He was heir to vast estates, a convinced Westerner, proud to be both European and deeply Russian, and one of the most civilized men of his time.

This is his story.

V.S. Pritchett explores the connections between Chekhov's life and art, showing how Chekhov (1860-1904) often based his fiction on experiences of his difficult early years where he was responsible for his impoverished family, and as a young doctor, reported on the conditions of the Russian penal colony at Sakhalin. Later he continued his medical career, even when he became a well-known writer and playwright.

First published in 1988, this book focuses on the short stories of Chekhov often neglected in favour of his plays and discusses why Chekhov was a success in both mediums. The...

The critical essays of V.S. Pritchett are unparalleled for their wit, geniality, subtlety and profound good sense. His survey of writers ranges from Fielding and Smollett to Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Nathanael West and William Golding... from Balzac to Dostoevsky and Gorky, with wonderful detours for minor figures.

Pritchett's commentaries are short and incisive and are written from the point of view of the engaged reader rather than from the specialized approach of the scholar and formal analyst of literary structure. Not since Virginia Woolf's Common Reader and Edmund Wilson's...

First published in 1937, this thrilling novel tells the story of an expedition by three Englishmen into the Brazilian jungle; a journey which turns into an obsessive quest for the truth behind a missionary's disappearance seventeen years earlier.

The three men are each linked in different ways to the same woman in England, and her presence overshadows the whole narrative. At the centre of the expedition is Harry Johnson, the son of the missing missionary-a solitary explorer-hero who is obsessed by the woman, Lucy. Charles Wright, the leader of the expedition, is Lucy's step-father,...

So what are you waiting for? It's time to...

Admirers of The Spanish Temper, Marching Spain and his wonderfully evocative books on London, Dublin and New York will need no reminding that V.S. Pritchett is one of the very great travel writers of our time, possessed of an astonishingly accurate eye and a marvellous ability to conjure up the essence of a place, and of the people who live there.

Written for the most part in the 1950s and 1960s, the essays brought together in At Home and Abroad cover South and North America, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, London, Greece, the Pyrenees, Germany, the English countryside and, above all, the...