Evening Post, Jan 19

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness Richard Yates, Methuen, £7.99

These stories hail from the drab parts of post-war New York. Their action is uniformly small-scale and tends towards the grim: a raggedy new boy at primary school fails to lie his way to popularity; the grouchy residents of a TB sanatorium scrabble for some kind of cheer on New Year’s Eve. What makes them a treasure, though, and has brought them back into print after 40 years, is Richard Yates’s power of close observation. There’s little obviously showy here, but every third sentence brings on a glow of recognition.