Midsummer Night in the Workhouse: Selected Stories by Diana Athill

This new selection of Diana Athill’s stories, Midsummer Night in the Workhouse, provides a subtle counterpoint to her memoirs because the focus of the stories is autobiographical: although not in the first person, they are about facets of a life which Diana knew through and through, either because she was, as she has said, writing about herself (the story about her first kiss or the one about an Oxford undergraduate and her boyfriend) or because she had sharply observed those around her (an Englishwoman on holiday having an affair, a married couple bickering at a dinner party). Diana herself has recently recorded these perceptive, touching and funny stories.