Twenty-eight short stories by the Katherine Mansfield Prize–winning author: “a most impressive collection, a work of genuine imagination” (Observer, UK).
 
Elspeth Davie is one of Scotland’s finest and most unjustly overlooked short-story writers. Her prose style is as clear and occasionally unnerving as that of Muriel Spark, yet her work reveals a gentler and more compassionate, but no less penetrating eye for the beauty and the strangeness of the human condition.
 
In The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books and Other Stories, readers will discover Davie’s wry humor, her ear for the cadences of daily life, and her innate understanding of the depths and absurdities hidden just beneath the surface. With an introduction by Giles Gordon, this wide-ranging collection of the very best of Davie’s short fiction offers an important reassessment of a wonderful writer.
 
"Mrs. Davie commands a beautifully clear prose style that she can intensify when necessary to touch the hem of poetry." —Edinburgh Evening News