Girl, Balancing & Other Stories

Helen Dunmore Hutchinson £20

Helen Dunmore’s untimely death last year robbed fiction of one of its most eloquent voices. It was her emotional concision that made her so exceptional, a quality on ample display in these posthumous short stories, more than 30 of them, some absolute gems. Whether she’s musing on a portrait of John Donne, describing two widows forming a friendship over the garden fence or putting herself in the shoes of a university liaison officer, wrong-footed by one of his Chinese students, Dunmore always has something worth saying, and says it in lapidary language, without a hint of ostentation. Max Davidson