A chronicle of the love affairs of a beautiful but wayward upper-class English girl in a skating community in the English countryside.

Bates describes a single woodland year in this enchanting book.

"If we set H. E. Bates's best tales against the best of Chekhov's," Graham Greene declared, "I do not believe it would be possible, with any conviction, to argu

The earliest of these stories, The Flame, was first published in 1926, having been written a year earlier, when I was twenty; the latest appeared in 1961. The i