The Garden Party and Other Stories

Innovative, startlingly perceptive and aglow with colour, these fifteen stories were written towards the end of Katherine Mansfield`s tragically short life. Many are set in the author`s native New Zealand, others in England and the French Riviera. All are revelations of the unspoken, half-understood emotions that make up everyday experience - from the blackly comic `The Daughters of the Late Colonel`, and the short, sharp sketch `Miss Brill`, in which a lonely woman`s precarious sense of self is brutally destroyed, to the vivid impressionistic evocation of family life in `At the Bay`. `All that I write,` Mansfield said, `all that I am - is on the borders of the sea. It is a kind of playing.`