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In two or three paragraphs William Trevor (my new favourite writer) effortlessly absorbs you into the situation of another small group of people (a 36 year old woman in rural Ireland realises it’s time she stopped going to weekly dances at the ludicrously named Ballroom of Romance; a woman is stood up at a party by her husband and becomes possessed by the idea that he’s going to turn up with his new girlfriend and ask for a divorce) until you begin to feel that the average novel is a lumbering hippo (no offence, you hippos, but you do lumber) and the short story as written by a William Trevor is a fleet-footed gazelle, 30 or 40 pages only required.

A number of these stories are about the crumbling mental health of women living with perfectly ordinary men. He is great on showing the true appalling nature of the perfectly ordinary.