In stories of astonishing compression and insight, Mavis Gallant wrote of characters severed from their home, exiles disconnected from each other and from themselves. Tracing the fault lines of the post-war world in the intimate lives of her characters, she could conjure an entire worldview in a telling gesture or passing comment. This new volume, selected and introduced by Tessa Hadley, collects the finest work from across Gallant's career. Here are stories of young men returning from wartime internment to changed families, snobbish social climbers haunted by the words of their downtrodden colleagues, and children peering through glass at the secrets and infidelities of their parents. Complex, moving and painfully true, they secure her position among the world's great short story writers.

'The irrefutable master of the short story in English, Mavis Gallant has, among her colleagues, many admirers but no peer. She is the standout. She is the standard-bearer. She is the standard' - Fran Lebowitz

'[Gallants stories] are their own genre in a way; they are so much richer, so much denser than so many novels... Her body of work is unique and profound; I dont think there will be another quite like her' - Jhumpa Lahiri

'Gallant always surprised us, she never bothered with the dramatically obvious. As a writer she was beholden to no one. And for a writer whose stories could be dark and misanthropic, it is remarkable to see how many of them are also gently, continually funny' - Michael Ondaatje

'Unblinkingly attentive and keen-eyed . . . Wise, dry, funny, and subtle' - Hermione Lee

'Luminescent, subtle and lasting. Gallants chronicles of internal and external exile are a fitting tribute to a diasporic century' - Guardian

Mavis Gallant (1922-2014) was born in Montreal and worked as a journalist before moving to Europe to devote herself to writing fiction. After traveling extensively she settled in Paris, where she lived until her death, though she never renounced her Canadian citizenship. Starting in 1951, the New Yorker published 116 of her stories. She was the recipient of the 2002 Rea Award for the Short Story and the 2004 PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement. Tessa Hadley is the author of eight highly praised novels and three collections of stories. She won the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2016, The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016, and 'Bad Dreams' won the 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.