Noughts and Crosses: Stories, Studies and Sketches

These twenty-odd pieces shimmer with the particular magic of a writer who knew Cornwall as intimately as his own heartbeat. Arthur Quiller-Couch, the beloved 'Q' of British letters, serves up stories that range from the quietly devastating to the improbably gay, interleaved with essays and sketches that reveal a mind both learned and delightfully eccentric. The tales carry you from fog-shrouded Cornish villages to the smoky corners of London, populated by fishermen, servants, roguish gentlemen, and the occasional ghost who may or may not know he's dead. What unites them is Q's peerless ear for dialogue and his eye for the telling detail that unlocks an entire life in a sentence. This is storytelling from an age that had not yet forgotten how to spin a yarn properly, when a short story could still end on a perfect, lingering note of ambiguity. For readers who crave the unhurried pleasures of well-crafted fiction, these noughts and crosses offer hours of quietly addictive reading.