The narrator, Evelyn, recalls the series of experiences during childhood summers at Donegal, which led to his perception of the world as an adult.

The eleven short stories in this prize-winning collection pivot on life's ambiguities and the central question they pose in Tabucchi's fiction: is it choice, fate, accident, or even, occasionally, a kind of magic that plays the decisive role in the protagonists' lives? The eleven short stories in this prize-winning collection pivot on life's ambiguities and the central question they pose in Tabucchi's fiction: is it choice, fate, accident, or even, occasionally, a kind of magic that plays the decisive role in the protagonists' lives? Blended with the author's wonderfully intelligent imagination is his compassionate perception of elemental aspects of the human experience, be it grief as in "Waiting for Winter," about the widow of a nation's literary lion, or madcap adventure as in "The Riddle," about a mysterious lady and a trip in Proust's Bugatti Royale.

An American visitor and uninvited guest in the village of Nok, Marie Hasluck is an irrepressible anthropologist who believes that she has found the Kingdom of Heaven in the forests of Nigeria. There, to her eyes, the Birri tribesmen make love and war unfettered by the constraints and complications of Western civilisation; a state which Marie finds enviable and which she does her best to emulate. However, all is not well even in this pagan paradise: white prospectors are staking claims within Birri territory and the eccentric District Officer, Bewser, can no longer keep them at bay, for all his promises to the villagers. As the Birri warriors become increasingly enraged by the colonialists’ betrayal and as her own involvement with Bewser deepens, Marie finds that her position as a charmed but distanced onlooker is inevitably compromised.

The protagonist, Charley Brown, is a lively, inventive boy who, as a stranger (an evacuee in the early days of the Second World War), is beset by constant challenges, hostility and complications. One of his first deeds is to let loose the local bull. Boys who one minute had taunted him with the refrain 'Ballocky baldy' (Charley's lice had been evacuated from London with him), were the next minute acknowledging him as their natural leader. Charley Brown, one of Joyce Cary's most memorable creations, is a figure of contrasts, aesthete and delinquent, leading his gang into daring acts both grand and bad. As his sweetheart, Lizzie Galor rightly puts it, he's every bit as good as the movies ... On first publication it was praised as 'a brilliant story' ("News Chronicle"), a 'patient and penetrating analysis of children's minds' ("The Times"), and as 'splendid entertainment as well as an electrifying revelation of the young idea' ("Observer").

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Lieutenant's Lady" by Bess Streeter Aldrich. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Joyce Cary was a well-known British novelist born in Ireland.