Throughout her career the internationally renowned South African writer Nadine Gordimer has built a literary reputation with her incisive short stories as much as with her acclaimed novels. Together with her essays, this highly imaginative and committed body of work won her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. In the opinion of the Academy: 'Through her magnificent epic writing she has - in the words of Alfred Nobel - been of very great benefit to humanity.'

Gordimer has said that while novelists take the reader by the hand developing 'a consistency of relationship that does not and cannot convey the quality of human life, where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the only thing one can be sure of - the present moment.'

Now, for the first time, the best of her stories are published in one volume.