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.

This is the first volume in a series begun by Isobel Murray and Bob Tait in 1984, and finished in 2008 Authors covered in other volumes include: 2. Iain Banks, Bernard MacLaverty, Naomi Mitchison, Iain Crichton Smith, Alan Spence. 3. Janice Galloway, John Herdman, Robin Jenkins, Joan Lingard, Ali Smith. 4. Jackie Kay, Ian Rankin, Alan Massie, James Robertson, William (Bill) Watson. Extracts from Reviews for Volume 3 Murray is a fine interviewer as well as an incisive critic, academic and biographer. These aren't the kind of interviews that merely gift-wrap the books under discussion; here...

'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.

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...

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...

Eschewing Plutarch and Shakespeare's tale of Mark Antony's fatal romance, Naomi Mitchison's 'Cleopatra's People' starts with the next generation, with the children of the Queen and of Charmian, one of her 'mates'. The impact of Cleopatra's life and personality is reflected through them, and their efforts to follow in her wake.

Ancient Greek history and politics fascinated Naomi Mitchison, and in particular the long antagonism or rivalry of Athens and Sparta. In this, her second novel, she investigates the two city states through Alxenor, a young man from the tiny island of Poieessa, which changes hands along with the balance of power.

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,...

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 Delicate Fire illustrates a fundamental change in Naomi Mitchison's work. The early stories are set in ancient Greece, like many before them. But here Mitchison effectively says farewell to that setting with accounts of the worlds of Sappho and 'Lovely Mantinea'. By the end, she seems wholly turned to the twentieth century - a new departure for her - tackling subjects such as the General Strike of 1926 and contemporaneous Hunger marches, and battles against censorship. This shift marks her politicisation, her growing fear of fascism, but more personally also the end of her long affair...