Selected Stories by H.E. Bates

This is a really old edition that I must have picked up in a charity shop somewhere and forgotten about.
These stories were all written in the 1930's and are very evocative of that age. The writing is incredible and conveys the atmosphere beautifully, but they are pretty much all about love, loss and death, and I found them actually quite depressing to read. Perhaps it was the sense of impending doom with the approach of the second world war that casts such a shadow over the book. Not sure I could cope with a whole novel by Bates!