Of course, of everybody of whom this particular hero was suspicious, he was most suspicious of femme fatale, of this woman he was in love with.

Between his second and third tours of duty, a soldier returns home. To his former home, that is, using an old key while the new tenant is at work.

She was one of the fugitive bands of Cherokee who'd resisted capture long ago. Decades later, her family takes Great Mam on a road trip home, to a place now named Cherokee.

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles.

Through stories within stories Chandra tells a spiralling tale of loss, and of two wounded people becoming something new. Borrowing a structure from the Mahabharata, Vikram Chandra tells a spiralling story of loss, and of two wounded people becoming something new.

Either way, this fragmented evocation of unrequited desire is, in the words of Joyce's biographer Richard Ellmann, a work of 'small, fragile, enduring perfection'. With a new introduction by Colm Toibin.

A chance encounter leads a man to spend the afternoon with an older woman who escaped him 15 years earlier. trapped between her dead husband and a son who rejects everything that is youthful in her, she has allowed herself to age almost beyond recognition. The man's assessment of her appearance is brutal.