Dancing Girls and Other Stories

“Beside the stream a man was playing the flute; and around him, in long Howered robes and mauve scuffies, their auburn hair floating around their healthy pink faces, smiling their Dutch smiles, the dancing girls were sedately dancing.”

Here is a vivid gallery of the women and men we all know — seen as only Margaret Atwood can see them. They are university students, pregnant women and journalists; farmers, birdwatchers, wife-beaters — and dancing girls. All are “ordinary” people, some a little bizarre. We see bereft patients at a psychiatrist’s funeral, the obsessive consumption of food by ex-wives; we learn of the role of cigarette cards in adolescent courtship, and the fantasies that lovers have. These people write poems, fall in love and feel pain; they need money, they follow the rules, they break down. They live in a world of complex relationships and daily struggles — and they triumph in the most surprising ways.

Margaret Atwood, poet, short-story writer, novelist and literary critic, has been described by Germaine Greer as “one of our most important writers in English today”. Virago publish all her five novels — The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Lady Oracle, Life Before Man and Bodily Harm — as well as this collection of tender, funny, absorbing and beautifully-written short stories.