Coll Stories E. Bowen

elizabeth bowen's stories are well crafted. reading them (for me... i was born in 1974) is like peeking into the drawing room of a time long gone and now crystallised on the page. i gave the book 4 stars instead of five, because while some of the stories are real gems, others fell flat to me. this was my first experience with her work, and 760 odd pages of short stories was a lot of stories! i would recommend, unless you just want to read a few stories at a time, (the book is broken up into decades and then pre and post war sections)or you are already a huge fan, to start out with a smaller collection of her work. then again, why not pay a few extra dollars and get them all at once? i escpecially recommend the stories of the twenties and thirties, they really are delightful... the ghosts and murderessess inhabiting some of them are intriguing, there's a flavour to her work you simply don't find in newer fiction. reading her work was like entering another time zone, quite interesting stuff!