Book
Twenty-One Stories
First published 1954
This collection gathers stories written between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, including The Basement Room, The Destructors, The Hint of an Explanation and Across the Bridge. Children, criminals, priests, expatriates and ordinary workers encounter moments in which curiosity, fear or loyalty produces consequences they cannot reverse.
The settings range from interwar Britain to wartime and post-war societies, but the stories repeatedly return to betrayal, class, religious doubt and the danger of incomplete knowledge. Twenty-One Stories expands the earlier Nineteen Stories collection with later work; it is a revised collection rather than a simple retitling of the earlier book.
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