This selection of Winifred Holtby's short stories is drawn from her two published volumes, Truth is not Sober and Pavements of Anderby which were published posthumously by her two friends, Vera Brittain and Hilda Reid and have been collected here in one volume for the first time.

Brightly written, in an unselfconscious, matter-of-fact style, these stories are irreverent and entertaining, fulfilling what she saw as the short story's purpose in a reader's life: 'nice for chance guests - easy to pick up and more tantalising for one's bedside than a novel'.

Many of these stories are autobiographically based, and feature the Yorkshire farming community in Rudston where she was brought up. This was the setting for her most famous novel, South Riding, also published posthumously. Some of the stories relate to the last years of her life when she was contending with the incessant headaches and nausea of Bright's disease.