Reviews

The Pangs of Love and Other Stories by Jane Gardam

toni_says_smile's review against another edition

5.0

Nobody writes short stories like Jane Gardam. She manages to imbue a handful of pages with emotional intensity and a feeling of consequence that most people need a novel to do. The way these stories are arranged is also a triumph - their order plays into their subject matter and you really get a sense of a group full of disparate people sharing a world, just like in real life. So glad I picked this up.

bookpossum's review against another edition

4.0

I am working my way through the books of Jane Gardam, whose spare and elegant prose I enjoy very much. This collection of short stories exploring different aspects of love is another enjoyable visit to her world. I particularly liked the way the first and last stories gave different aspects of the same meeting, but my favourite was the title story, about the Little Mermaid's younger sister.

Delicious.

opal360's review against another edition

4.0

Hard for me to give this a rating: some stories are spectacular, others less so. But I always love how she nails the Englishness of the English.