The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books

Elspeth Davie is one of Scotland's finest and most underrated short-story writers. Her prose style is as clear and occasionally unnerving as that of Muriel Spark, yet her work reveals a gentler and more compassionate, but no less penetrating eye for the beauty and the strangeness of the daily human condition.

This wide-ranging collection of the very best of Elspeth Davie's short fiction offers an important reassessment of a wonderful writer.