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Missing The Midnight
  • Published: 1 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409027102
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook

Missing The Midnight

Fables and Grotesques




An acknowledged master of the art of short-story writing at the height of her powers.

A delicious treat, MISSING THE MIDNIGHT is the new book of short stories by Jane Gardam. This volume marks a new departure for Jane Gardam - 'Missing the Midnight', 'The Virgins of Bruges' and some of the stories have Christmas themes; others are fables, many of them with a touch of surrealism. In each of the stories, Jane Gardam's imagination and humanity, her humour and powers of observation, are as sharp and satisfying as ever.

  • Published: 1 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409027102
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook

About the author

Jane Gardam

Jane Gardam is a novelist, writer of short stories and author of children's books. Over her long and successful career, Jane Gardam has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize (for Old Filth in 2005) and for the Booker Prize (for God on the Rocks, also filmed for TV) and is the only writer to have been twice awarded the prize for Whitbread Novel of the Year (for The Hollow Land and Queen of the Tambourine). She also holds a Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime's contribution to the enjoyment of literature. Her other books include The Flight of the Maidens, Faith Fox, Going into a Dark House and Missing the Midnight. As well as an acclaimed novelist, she is a writer of short stories such as The People on Privilege Hill, whose title story was runner-up in the BBC National Short Story Award and was read on Radio 4. Jane Gardam was awarded the OBE in the 2009 New Year's Honours lists for services to literature. She was born in Yorkshire and lives in Kent.

Praise for Missing The Midnight

Jane Gardam has fashioned a dozen sturdy stories with surprisingly dark souls. Subtitled 'Hauntings and Grotesques', they trespass on a world of menace and shadow with all the brio of a rambler tramping an overgrown footpath. Short, stocky sentences march ahead of the languid poeticisms usually preferred for tales of the unexpected. Never is a word wasted.

Observer