A Friend of Kafka

More about the book

This is probably the finest collection of short stories by a writer whose name has been linked (by both The Times and the Guardian) with that of Tolstoy. He writes with equal assurance of a professor of history (St Francis to the Warsaw pigeons), a coal-heaver, a Bohemian writer, a rich widow or a chimney sweep: and somehow, one and all, they seem to tread a precarious path between the supernatural world and the inviting pit of material reality.