Charles Palliser
Fear of Falling
On the Edge of the Cliff and Other Stories
By V S Pritchett
Chatto & Windus 179pp £5.95 order from our bookshop
A theme running through most of these highly accomplished stories is the way we evade the dangerous truth by means of the fictions, lies, and compromises with reality which we perpetrate in order to keep a marriage, a love affair, or a friendship going, or to preserve an image of ourselves. As fictions about the fiction-making instinct they achieve at their best – and most of them are very good – a complex but unforced ambiguity in which it becomes difficult or impossible to be sure finally who is lying or whether one character is only pretending to believe the fictions of another.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'This book takes in a lot of territory, all solidly researched and footnoted. But dry? Fuhgeddaboutit.'
Patricia T O'Conner on E J White's 'You Talkin' To Me? The Unruly History of New York English'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/tawk-of-the-town
'The identification of a mighty force sparkling intermittently seems to me to constitute the finest and most consistent poetic achievement of Goudie’s book.'
Candia McWilliam on @lachlangoudie's 'The Story of Scottish Art'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/all-that-glisters
Though 'the hotel had a reputation as the area’s best, its staff were not used to looking after world leaders, so the arrival of Cuba’s new strongman, Fidel Castro, came as something of a shock.'
@dcsandbrook on @simonhallwriter's 'Ten Days in Harlem'.
http://ow.ly/I63850Bvs10