Thomas Hardy: The Complete Stories, edited by Norman Page (Dent, £14.99 in UK)

Somehow, Hardy was not quite a great short story writer, it is hard to say exactly why especially since so many of his poems read like short stories put into verse. The genre seems not to have taken deep root in Victorian England as it did in France or Russia; certainly Hardy, at home in a wide angled canvas, is uneasy or stilted in a small one, as well as lacking in pace. What he gives us are mainly incidents, or dramatised situations, or even anecdotal slices of life, but there is no real sign that he understood the artistry of short story writing as Turgenev or Gottfried Keller or Maupassant did.