Naomi Mitchison published her first novel in 1923, and in more than 70 succeeding books she produced an extraordinary output, especially in novels and short stories. This selection of her shorter fiction illustrates her range and achievement over more than 50 years.

'When We Become Men' deals with the contemporary fight for equality across southern Africa and the struggle against apartheid. Naomi Mitchison provides a vivid and clear account of a troubled people in transition, which helps the reader to understand and empathise with the birth-pangs of a new, post-imperial Africa.

Mary Elizabeth Haldane was Naomi Mitchison's paternal grandmother ('Granniema'). Like her granddaughter, she lived to be a centenarian, raised a large family, exhibited varied talents and died beloved by a wide range of family, friends and admirers. Her children included her son Richard, who was Secretary of State for War, and then Lord Chancellor, Mitchison's father, a great scientist whose work saved many lives, and the author/editor of this slim volume, originally compiled really for family and friends, Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane, an outstanding woman who became Scotland's first woman...

Louisa 'Maya' Haldane was the widow of physiologist John Scott Haldane, and the mother of J. B. S. Haldane and Naomi Mitchison. In these memoirs she gives a remarkably detailed account of the life of the well-to-do in the second half of the nineteenth century - in Ireland, Scotland and the Continental spas as well as in England - as seen through the eyes of a growing girl and an independently-minded young woman. The story continues up to the time of the First World War, with chapters focusing on particular topics: her education, her husband's early career, the position of servants in town and...

In this unusual and accomplished novel, Naomi Mitchison retells in realistic terms and colloquial dialogue the story of the passion and death of Jesus, hour by hour, as it unfolds over the 24 hours of Good Friday.

On February 24th, 1934 - shortly after the civil war in Austria and the defeat of the Socialists - Naomi Mitchison left England on a visit to Vienna in order to do what she could to relieve the terrible distress of the defeated. In this day-by-day diary she tells us what she saw, did and felt: and the whole forms at once what is called a human document of rare poignancy and dramatic interest, and a book of some historical importance. Very few people have both money and leisure- and the will-to do this. I've got this because of my profession. I rang up V ictor] G ollancz] on Monday evening,...

The Conquered was young Naomi Mitchison's first novel, published in 1923, just five years after the end of the First World War, in 1918. Mitchison chose to write about wars, but about historic ones, Julius Caesar's bloody and gradual conquest of Gaul. Instead of Caesar's serene lists of victories and setbacks, we have the impact of these wars on her Gallic hero Meromic. Profound and traumatic. From being heir to a proud tribe, the Veneti, he becomes by turns a slave, a revenge killer, a wanted man - and a slave again, with a severed right hand, a man looking to end it all. But his life was...

Small Talk... avoids the temptation of a full-blown 'My Life and Times' type of autobiography and presents instead a recreation of childhood years in Oxford before the First World War - a child's-eye view of the family, the friends, the servants, the pets and the holidays in Scotland and Cornwall that made up that childhood. It is as much concerned with her own development as an amateur field botanist as with the occasions when the adult world intruded, when 'Uncle Richard' (Lord Haldane) might lead the younger members of the family out to the wash-house to watch the messy business of heating...

Volume two of Naomi Mitchison's 'Essays and Journalism' is devoted to the West Highland village of Carradale, to which she moved in the late 1930s. She writes about many aspects of Carradale: her farm, the local fishing industry, the big garden which was particularly dear to her heart, and 'the village and the Big House'.

Anna Comnena is described as the first female historian, the author of her father's celebratory biography. She was an educated princess in eleventh-century Constantinople, the daughter of the Emperor Alexius. She was expected to succeed him, and raised as heir, but her hopes were dashed by the birth of a younger brother. In what is over-modestly described as a biography, Naomi Mitchison combines her story with that of her father, and the whole civilisation of the Eastern Empire, indeed the whole known world of the time. The Eastern Empire is seen as a necessary bulwark between a young and...