Elspeth Davie (1918–1995)

These five short stories from the Scottish writer Elspeth Davie are very hard to characterise. They leave you with a sense of unease although they are no more than vignettes about ordinary people at that point when subconscious desires or feelings quietly erupt through social convention.

The eruptions are very slight but they imply volcanic pressure just below the surface. We are being given a small glimpse of the true nature of the beast hiding under a civilised veneer. That beast never show more appears, no evils are done and no actual disruptions to the social fabric take place.

Struggling to describe these further, I would place them in a literary genre all of their own - the psychoanalytic where nothing can be formally stated. The final results, though always in fine prose, come closer to the sensibility of poetry than to that of the novel. show less

The title story describes what it will be like when the e-book takes over the world and nearly everyone has forgotten what printed books were like to hold and feel - and smell