In his more than eighty years, Francis Wyndham has published very little—one novella and two collections of stories—but his is one of the most individual and compelling bodies of work by a contemporary English writer. As Alan Hollinghurst has said, Wyndham’s fiction stands in the tradition of social comedy that goes back through Henry James to Jane Austen, with this difference: Wyndham writes about the lives of privileged and even titled people, but he is drawn to outcasts and odd ducks, adolescents, lonely women, addicts, eccentrics, and idlers. The earliest stories here, gathered under the title Out of the War, are brilliant vignettes of deprivation and desire written during World War II. The later Mrs Henderson and Other Stories, by contrast, offers scrupulously observed tragicomic pictures of the vagaries of upper-class English family life. Finally, in the Whitbread Prize–winning short novel The Other Garden, a shy teenage boy living in the country strikes up an unlikely friendship with Kay, the thirty-something daughter of neighbors, sister to a famous actor, and black sheep of her family. Kay, with her whims and crazes and boyfriends, is unable to hold her own against her family’s disapproval, and the narrator watches with helpless fascination as her small but very real tragedy is played out against the background of the Second World War. " The Complete Fiction of Francis Wyndham , which also includes the 1985 Mrs. Henderson and Other Stories and the 1987 novella The Other Garden , is a collection of beguiling consistency." -- The Boston Phoenix "One of the great authors of the 20th century...He has been compared to Jane Austen, Henry James and P.G. Wodehouse - he is as satirical as the first, as dry as the second and as funny (well, not quite) as the third. Like them, his topic is the British bourgeoisie, but his era touches our own, and his lodestone is World War II...it is the author's most recent writings - 'Mrs. Henderson and Other Stories' - that are shocking and beautiful in their pitch-perfect evocation of an era only just lost, an era that still echoes." --Newsday "Wyndham, a legend in contemporary English letters, is pretty much unknown here. As an editor, he mentored Bruce Chatwin and V.S. Naipaul and rediscovered Jean Rhys. As a writer, he has published little -- only three books in 40 years, but this is fiction of outstanding quality, short stories on the whole, posed somewhere between Henry James and Jane Austen." -- Los Angeles Times "The earliest stories were written in the 1940s when Wyndham was invalided out of the war, and give us an odd, sideways but utterly convincing glimpse into a lost world. " --Esther Freud "Beautifully written, full of emotional honesty, these are stories to savour, and reread." -- The Times (London) "Wyndham's prose has an almost luminous clarity of expression, and he is excellent at capturing not just the detail but the mood of a particular period." -- Times Literary Supplement "Exceptionally accomplished...a writer who never wastes a word or puts one wrong...He belongs in a tradition of social comedy going back through Henry James to Jane Austen." –Alan Hollinghurst “Winner of England's Whitbread Prize for best first novel of 1987, this clear, spare volume brings us, at the outbreak of World War II, into the lives of the teenage narrator and Kay, his 30-ish friend of offhand behavior, laconic speech and deliberately shabby clothes. Kay, like the "other garden" near the narrator's house, is an attractive combination of the cozy and the strange. In this small English village, she and the narrator are passive rebels against conformity. We follow their intertwined stories throughout the war: Kay works in a local canteen and has a brief, devastating affair with an American G.I.; the narrator recuperates from a broken ankle after only three months as an army private; a homosexual Oxford friend goes off to a sanitarium to recover from TB (soon to be joined there by Kay, also suffering from the disease). For reasons never made entirely clear, Kay's parents, with whom she lives, reject and scorn her, until she is forced because she adopts a dog who becomes the center of her life to move away to a difficult existence in blitz-beleaguered London. Wyndham uses quiet, evocative prose to render a poignant story.” – Publishers Weekly “In southern England at the outbreak of World War II, the young narrator forms a friendship with Kay, a woman nearly 20 years his senior. The friendship survives for several years, during which the narrator leaves home to attend Oxford, escaping military service through illness. Meanwhile, Kaya spirited, unusual, but unhappy woman takes up with an American serviceman, moves from job to job, falls ill with tuberculosis. In this short novel, winner of England's Whitbread prize in 1987, there are no sensational events, but ordinary lives are made interesting by Wyndham's lucid, penetrating, and effortless prose. An intellige