Originally published in 1940, Fred Urquhart's first collection of short stories brings to life the modern Scotland of the 1930s, using his inimitably vivid dialogue. He shows the struggles of working-class women, whether labouring in a sweatshop, facing death in a tuberculosis hospital or seeking escape on a bike of her own. His male characters also have problems, caused by army life, religion or homosexuality in a period of oppression. Life is sometimes overshadowed by the approach of war. But there is comedy too, for example a fraught day at Glasgow's Empire Exhibition of 1938. And Urquhart...

The scene is Edinburgh, 1939. Lives are about to change. Blackout, bomb shelters, cinemas, dance halls, all call out to the girls and young women that life need not be dull. This book, set in one of the poorer areas, is full of the comedy and extraordinary dialogue for which Fred Urquhart is well known, and the Hipkiss family and its neighbours are foregrounded. But central is the imagination of young Bessie Hipkiss, aged fourteen, only just too old to be evacuated. Bessie's fantasy life as a princess of an exiled French Royal Family contrasts with the disappointing ordinariness of everyday,...

Jezebel's Dust is the story of two young teenage girls infected by the love of uniforms in Edinburgh and London early in the war. They come from the slums and have no very high education or expectations, but the war is opening up new possibilities. Lily McGillivray is the chief man-eater and increasingly a 'good time girl'. She exploits and encourages her more passive and awkward friend Bessie Hipkiss, leading her astray with energy, as they meet up with sailors and soldiers, Free French, Polish and American. Ambition, sex, money and idleness are Lily's motivators. All the old standards are...

By 1937, many people, both employed and unemployed, were anticipating war, but from 1939 they were all thrust into it. Fred Urquhart's second collection of short stories reflects this. The young men are often reluctant to sign up for the Forces: the world seems on the move. Tenement dwellers react to the mysteries of Blackout, sirens, air-raids, air-raid shelters. Urquhart's stories reflect all this in robust and often comic fashion. The longest, 'The Laundry Girl and the Pole', concerns one of his favourite subjects, the transformation that foreign soldiers could bring to local girls,...

-The Year of the Short Corn- was first published in 1949, and the war, or its immediate aftermath, forms a presence in most of the stories. It can be a civilian family gathered together with scattered serving children for a precious Christmas leave, or a son or daughter returning from one of the services; it can illustrate clothes rationing, and the avid fervour with which civilian women greet silk stockings; it can be a 'townser' who thinks too much of himself who becomes snowbound on a North East farm, or the rage and humiliation of a young castrated ox. It can even be an Edinburgh...

Some of the best of Fred Urquhart's ghost stories are gathered in this volume. Throughout he displays the great skill in characterisation and dialogue that he is noted for, and, as in all his work, his native Scotland is seldom far away.

This is the first publication of the last collection of his short stories that Fred Urquhart planned, and displays the full range of his work.

Fred Urquhart's lively collection of stories deals with life in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and demonstrates his fascination with American culture and its effect on Britain. The title story - a highly amusing satirical novella - presents a young Scotswoman who is desperate to cross the Atlantic as a war bride in order to get to Hollywood, armed with a tartan skirt and a copy of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Other stories portray an eccentric woman who has watched too many films, an American musician who has been luckless in his marriages, and an Edinburgh office where the...