Some of these stories first appeared in 1943, and in an author's introduction Mary Lavin confessed that she had, with varying degrees of success, attempted to "tidy them up" afterwards. Several of the pieces, notably "The Green Grave and the Black Grave", with its sing-song repetition of key phrases, and "A Fable", with its fairy-tale inscrutability, show a writer still experimenting with language and enthralled by its endless possibilities, but the fully-fledged Lavin style is also here in force in the sun-drenched tranquillity of "Brother Boniface", the stark truths of "At Sallygap" and the limpid inevitability of the superb "Lilacs", with its devastating final sentence. It's a pity, perhaps, that it was the death of Mary Lavin which inspired the republication of this little volume: but it's wonderful to think that a whole new generation of readers will discover her work as a result.
