Just Around the Corner: Romance en casserole.

The best short-story writers find their drama not in far-off adventure but just around the corner, in the crowded rooms and shopfronts of city life, and that is exactly where these tales make their home.

What it's about

This is a gathering of short fiction concerned with the loves, longings and small struggles of ordinary people, often against the backdrop of the modern city. The subtitle's playful promise of romance served up like a homely dish captures the spirit of the collection: warm, humane stories that find sentiment and comedy in everyday lives and the corners of the world most fiction overlooks.

Themes

The stories turn on love and yearning, on the dignity and hardship of working people, and on the way tenderness and hope survive amid the pressures of urban life. There is sympathy here for the overlooked and the striving, and a keen eye for the emotional textures of everyday experience, rendered with feeling rather than sentimentality.

Why it still matters

Fiction that takes ordinary lives seriously, and finds real drama in them, never goes out of date. These stories preserve a vivid sense of their period, its streets and shops and social types, while speaking to feelings that remain entirely familiar. They offer the particular pleasure of the well-turned short story, complete and satisfying in a small compass.

Who it's for

For readers who love short fiction and the drama of everyday life, for those drawn to warm, character-driven storytelling, and for anyone who enjoys finding romance and feeling in the ordinary corners of the world.