The Wild Cherry Tree

More about the book

In each of these ten stories H. E. Bates evokes places and defines a life you could never before have imagined. A pig farmer's wife secretly builds up a 'rich, expensive, dazzling' wardrobe to escape the filthy squalor of her life; a hypocritical do-gooder is driven to more than distraction by two jaguar-belt sirens; a woman wearing odd stockings gets involved with a man who reads his newspaper upside down... The Wild Cherry Tree shows Bates at his most tense and immediate; observing with baleful accuracy just what happens when people are 'thrown suddenly with neither direction nor compass into territory utterly strange or unexplored.'