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_By Salley Vickers, Viking, £14.99 _ Much praise is given to the Hosking Houses Trust who manage a series of delightful buildings in and around Stratford-upo-Avon and she credits Hampstead
and Dorset with inspiring stories in the collection. Would this be Vickers' contribution to that literary sub-genre the Aga saga? The first three stories didn't inspire a great
deal of confidence. The opening, The Churchyard, is a mild and melancholy quasi-ghost story but it's over before it has really begun. The second, Kleptomania, is distressingly slight in
its ambitions, ending with the most muted and sub-Roald Dahl of twists. And the third, The Train That Left When It Was Not Supposed To, is a disastrous exercise in the fantastical featuring
that stock character, the sexually available and mysterious eastern European. It threatened to be a very weak book indeed. Then, much to my relief, a couple of brilliant stories
substantially raised the bar. Most of the stories in this collection involve death in some fashion. Mown Grass, a perceptive and witty look at the aftermath of an adulterous affair, and the
haunting title story about a boy cursed with the gift of foretelling others' deaths, are beautifully written and have a clear grip on character without overstretching the material.
Thereafter the calibre seldom dips with the exception of the thin A Christmas Gift. Vickers' background as a psychoanalyst is clearly discerned in her delicate handling of characters
such as the bickering couple Beth and Hamish in Vacation, where what is unsaid is almost more important than what they say. She also has a gift for lyricism which comes out clearly in the
lengthy A Sad Tale, a fantasia about the young prince Mamillius from Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. So after a disappointing start, this compelling and often startlingly collection
of stories confirms that Vickers is more than just an adept chronicler of middle-class mores but also a storyteller of note and grace for whom this collection is a welcome step forward.